#er...or at least it's almost vore

[smolnoms]

A Wolf’s Gotta Eat

I’m writing a story, didn’t think I’d make it to three chapters, but to celebrate doing so I’m putting up the first chapter. It’s my favorite, as it’s got all the good shit I like in it.

What’s In It?: Mouthplay, unwilling prey, animal-human hybrid giants and tinies, mouthplay, foodplay (of sorts? It’s with alcohol.) teasing at soft/fatal vore, and lastly, mouthplay.

Plot’s not super relevant, but to summarize; This world is one of animalistic tinies and giants. Think hybrids. The tinies used to live on lands far below, but due to famines and shit, they found a way to the top through the generations. However, they weren’t expecting the large dangers that lay above…

Character desc. for your convenience: P’veil is a black wolf hybrid, Juol a monkey hybrid, and Hugh is a lizard hybrid. The tiny gets described in ch. but is currently unnamed until later chapters.

Down the wet, empty streets came a dark figure. 

They were one of the many mutts found infesting the shadiest parts of a town so run down and run over, it was a miracle that it still stood. 

Hard working to all, loyal to a rare few...but honestly? That could be said of many.

No, truly, despite their reputation and the respect they held, they never let themself be anything more than another faceless grunt of the back alleys, selling questionable products at best, and morally horrific at worst. Sometimes, even they were a tad frazzled by some of the things that found their way into their little corner of the market, such as the severed leg of a wolf, one that so closely resembled their own…

But, hey! That wasn’t relevant right now. 

What they were really focused on now, was getting a drink.

“Hey, world to P’veil!”

A snapping finger inches from their face jerked them back to reality. Standing before them was a gruff, round man, sporting a grin sharpened with fangs, and a lower portion heavily drabbed in the scales of a reptile. He even sported a short, thick tail just beyond him, one with rounded edges and stained a dull green.

Another voice, higher than his, spoke up besides him. “You’ve been rather spacy tonight…”

P’veil turned to look at a female this time, one with a lengthy brown tail and wide, clawed brown furred feet and hands.

“D’aww, guys, there’s no need to worry about me, I’m just fine.” The entire line was delivered without the friendly mirth one might have expected, and yet, it was paired with a genuine smile, one that shot past them and out beyond the stretching street.

“Well, if that’s the case, then hurry your little furry butt!” Hugh, the reptilian man, barked out in laughter.

“Yes, let’s,” the other, Juol, agreed. As she passed by P’veil, she grinned cheerily, and gently dragged her dull claws across P’veil’s arm. They shivered, goosebumps trailing behind.

“Come on now, wolfy,” Juol cooed, and P’veil couldn’t help but continue alongside their two friends.

The three walked the abandoned streets, void of the rare few honest folk still left in this town. On occasion, pairs of glowing eyes would appear from deeper, untredded roads, either sitting still, or scurrying away as soon as they were noticed.

It did not trouble these three. Not at all.

Having let the silence stretch out long enough, P’veil piped up, curiosity making their voice softer than it ought to be. “I hear this bar is different than the rest.”

“Oh, it’s true! Tell them, Hugh,” Juol sing-songed.

The old man grinned playfully, and paused to sweep a hand outwards to a single building. It was an unusually long building, brown bricked and colorfully stained by sputtering neon sign that hung, crooked, above the entrance. The narrow steel door was not one that invited the pure or the weak to join in on the fun.

“Why don’t you find out for yourself?”

P’veil found themself standing just in front of the door, brow raised and eyes flickering in appraisal. The only real thing that caught their gaze was the neon sign. 

Depicted in bright purple and yellow was a humanoid lioness. She was poised with a hand raised towards her mouth, and fingers wrapped around something. However, it didn’t appear to be a glass of wine...

Done loitering, P’veil finally placed a clawed hand on the cold door, and shoved it open.

“Right up to the front, now! To the bartop!” Hugh crowed, shuffling his overall straps higher before waddling over.

Juol merely hummed, and sauntered over with a toothy grin.

P’veil glanced around quickly. It was dark, with small lighting here and there that made it clear that it was deliberately dim. Numerous human-animal hybrid creatures were milling about, more or less quietly, all sectioned off into their little groups, and occasionally casting looks around at the others, just as P’veil was now doing. They stopped before they could make the mistake of making eye contact with someone, and went to join the other two.

Hugh and Juol sat siddled next to each other, and P’veil gravitated over to Hugh’s side, settling down on a plush, worn-red stool. Their pure black tail hung off the edge.

“I already took the liberty of ordering for you,” Hugh said. “For the joy of mystery!” he tacked on, to appease P’veil’s flash irritation.

“Oh, right, the secret,” they murmured. 

“Hmhmm! Oh, I just know you’ll love it! Perhaps, even more that Juol!”

“Impossible,” Juol smirked, eagerly awaiting her own drink with little bouncing motions.

Humming, P’veil settled further in their seat, softly tapping a sharp claw against the hard countertop. Hells, they were intrigued now. They supposed they could wait, just for a bit, for such an anticipation.

As they awaited their drink, they tried to guess at what the mystery was. First off, they relied on their best sense, and scented the air.

...Sweat and alcohol, expectedly. The heavy odor made them huff, though for a second, they detected something hiding just underneath. They licked their lips, and looked up at the menus that hung above the back of the bar.

And, as expected, it listed off all the drinks that were available, paired with the occasional image. 

Yet what was most curious about some of the drinks, from half the menus, were the strange words freshly painted next to them. Something about it sparked a familiar feeling from P’veil. They remembered that these things were very new, and a sudden popularity to the black market.

“Wait...are, is this-ow!” They sneered at Hugh, who had swatted them. “What was that for?”

“For cheating,” he smugly said. “Honestly, there’s no fun with you, I swear-”

Just then, the bartender returned. The three leaned forward on their seats, eagerly awaiting the reveal of their drinks. 

Not one to tease, the bartender (a hulking man with a snake’s head), swiftly slid a glass in front of each person. 

And P’veil...smiled...wide.

For, sitting right in the middle of their drink was a little, pink, amphibian, tiny humanoid.

And it was staring right up at them with scared, orange eyes.

“Oh Hugh! Ya really outdid yourself!” P’veil hollered, ribbing the man. He returned their laugh while dragging his own glass closer to himself. 

“I’m real glad you think so,” he rumbled, toying with his glass and his own prey that sat within. “Now, bon appetit!” 

“Yes.” They lifted up their glass in one swift motion. The pink axolotl-boy yelped and scrambled feebly for a hold as the glass began to tilt. “Bon appetit!”

The small hybrid cried out, his pleas ringing off the glass. “No!”s and “please!”s and “I don’t wanna die!” crashed and burned on their ears. 

The glass was emptied, and the prey tumbled into their mouth.

The rushing burn of alcohol was swallowed, and following it was the smooth, warm, struggling form of the small youth. Tiny hands feebly pushed out, brushing against their tongue, their teeth, and even smaller head nubs tickled the roof of their mouth. They simply sat there, feeling his squirming on their tongue, and relished in the euphoria of having something so small, so vulnerable, trapped within the heat of their mouth. After a moment sampling his taste, they teased their mouth open.

He gasped in a breath. Brown hair was matted, wet, to his forehead, along with his shorts, the only clothes to drape his body.

“Please, stop...I can’t…” he wheezed, already withering from the assault. He tried crawling outward, and they lifted him along with their tongue, watching amusedly as a tiny arm reached out into the open air.

And gently, ever so gently, they brought their tongue back in, and closed their fangs down on the arm.

He took in a sharp breath. They felt his body go impossibly still inside their mouth. In the silence, they felt his tiny heart hammering away inside his tiny rib cage, shuddering along at a mile a minute.

And then, with a rumbling laugh, their sharp maw opened once more. Their hands fished inside their teeth and removed the drenched, tiny body, and let him hover right in front of their face.

He stared back with impossibly wide eyes.

“Oh, yes,” they purred. A long tongue slid out and lapped up the sides of his body, taking extra pleasure as his tiny hands and feet pushed out in retaliation. “I do believe I will be coming here more often, eheheh. Now, shall we get this show on the road?” they asked. For some reason they couldn’t discern, a small spark lit up in their prey’s eyes, but they ignored it, preparing to slurp him up again. 

“Wait!” he cried, much louder than ever before. They ignored him, and decided to start with that tail of his. Licking a long stripe up its back, they opened up just enough to suck it in.

“I remember! I-she was- there was-!”

Two tiny legs kicked out as they opened up for those too, slipping them in and along their tongue without a second thought. They kicked and clawed, but found no hold along the slick muscle.

“Her name, it, it was-“

In came the torso. They felt his abdomen contract and wobble with his words, and small hands grasped desperately at their fangs.

“Her name, it was Ohrei!”

P’veil felt every muscle in their body freeze as their tiny prey warbled out that name. They gasped, and unfortunately began choking as this sent their prey halfway down their gullet.

“Woah, easy there P’veil!” Hugh slapped down hard on their back.

With a great spasm, they coughed the tiny body back onto the bar top. It slid along the polished wood, leaving a trail of saliva behind.

A heartbeat or two was spent coughing and sputtering, banging a fist on their chest as they fought to catch their breath. As it slowly came back to them, their gaze quickly sought out the form of their prey.

“Hey,” they barked. They leaned in and peered down at their prey. A long claw poked at him. 

“Hey! What did you say? Say it! Say it again!”

A groan issued out from him. He turned to them with bleary eyes. “Ohrei...she-she told me she knew someone who looked just like you…”

Dead silence. Large red eyes locked onto small orange ones, and for a moment, everything felt delicate and strained.

And he dared not move, watching with a wary eye as his fate twisted and coalesced into a new form…

[voreconnoisseur]

Ok but I need more Obey me vore- could you do some protective/possessive vore with the brothers? (And if you want the undate-ables to)

Yeeeeah babey this ones protective AND possessive! But for some of these asks I’m gonna be doing one bro per ask, with a long post, so hope you enjoy Mammon!

Getting in Trouble - High Stakes!

“Alright, listen up, human, ‘cause I’m only gonna tell you this once. If you’re gonna come with me, you have to stay hidden.”

As soon as you’d found out about the underground casino, you knew Mammon had to know about it. It practically had his name written all over it. And ever since, you’d been begging him to take you with you. He’d refused, initially, saying that it was dangerous... until your ordered him to take you with him. And then, of course, he’d reluctantly agreed.

“If any of them see you, it’s gonna be a mess. They’ll be all over me trying to get their hands on ya. And let me tell you, it is a TOUGH crowd there.”

You nodded enthusiastically. The main reason you wanted to go was because you knew you’d see Mammon at his peak. He was good at this sort of thing, despite what one might think with his tendency to overspend. You wanted to see how he played when the stakes were high!

And oh boy, were stakes going to get high.

***

Mammon had headed straight for the blackjack table. Peering from the pocket of his jacket, you couldn’t quite see the cards he’d been dealt. You could only hear and feel his reactions as he played. And from the sound of it, things weren’t going so well for him.

“Stand,” you heard him say, hesitantly. You saw the dealer flip his cards over... he had 21.

“...Dealer wins.”

“Shit.”

Mammon heaved a sigh, knocking you over inside his pocket in the process.

“Guess I’m out. I don’t have anything else to bet.”

The dealer spoke again, and the words that came out of his mouth sent a chill down your spine.

“The human in your pocket. I’ll bet everything you lost tonight if you put the human on the line, too.”

You could feel Mammon freeze.

“Eh—what’d you say?”

“The human. In. Your pocket. Why’d you bring it if not as a bargaining chip?”

There was a worrying silence. Surely, he would never—

“Fine. I’ll do it.”

Of course. Of course he’d try to get his money back at any cost. Of course Mammon would do that. You could imagine the *ka-ching* in his eyes.

You squirmed against Mammon’s hand as he grabbed you roughly and pulled you out from your hiding place, setting you down on the blackjack table.

“Mammon, why—“

Mammon put a giant finger to your lips—then brought it to his own; the symbol for quiet. You suddenly remembered your pact with him. You could stop him at any point and he knew it. Perhaps he had something planned...

You sat on the table, hungry gazes of the dealer and a few other demons watching burning into you. Your heart pounded—if something did happen, could Mammon protect you?

Now, with the full table in view, you could watch everything that happened. Mammon had a determined look on his face—a confident one.

The intensity just kept building as they played. A push. ANOTHER push. And now, with low value cards, Mammon was taking hits again and again.

You looked up at Mammon, whose eyes had previously been on his cards. Now he was focused directly at you. You could see sweat beginning to bead on his face, and yours probably didn’t look too different. But for just a split second, Mammon winked at you.

You’d come up with a secret sign a while ago at the House of Lamentation. It meant “cause a distraction.” Usually to prevent the other brothers from noticing something that would otherwise cause... problems. Right now, he was trying to tell you to do the same here.

“Hit me.”

As soon as the dealer started to flip the next card, you began to kick up a fuss. You screamed, cried, hyperventilated—and it worked. A few other demons came over to investigate. Even the dealer’s eyes left the cards for a second.

“Shut up down there,” he said, glaring over at you.

And that’s when Mammon swapped the new card for one he’d hidden in his sleeve.

To your surprise and relief, (and unlike many of Mammon’s plans) it worked. He’d swapped the card with a card that would give him exactly 21, and he’d done so before the dealer had even had a good look at it.

The dealer was forced to take another card and ended up busting. Mammon grinned, sliding all of the stacks of Grimm back into his bag, and snatching you from the table.

“Welp, better luck next time! Thanks for the refund~”

As he headed toward the exit, you scolded him.

“Mammon! That was really risky! I could’ve been that guy’s lunch! And what if he saw you cheat??”

“Aww, relax, Y/N. I would’ve just grabbed you and ran if it came to it. But then I wouldn’t be allowed back. Besides, the guy was TOTALLY cheatin’ even worse than me. He had the deck stacked. Or something like that.”

“...”

“...Come on. Like I would ever let MY human get taken by this random asshole.”

“Okay. I forgive you. But can we get out of here?”

“I’m already on it.”

You could see from your spot that Mammon was heading to the door, but. Uh oh.

“Don’t look now, but that guy doesn’t look happy with you.”

A demon who looked like some kind of bouncer, or bodyguard, or... henchman was blocking Mammon from leaving. His arms were crossed, showing off his rather beefy biceps. You could hear, additionally, someone approaching Mammon from behind. He turned to look and you saw him: the dealer from before.

“Hand over the human, cheater.”

Mammon froze, and you could feel him gulp.

“Wh-what are ya talkin about? I won completely fair and square!”

“Oh yeah? Then what’s this?”

The demon held up a card.

“Found it under your chair. You should’ve lost that round, but you got rid of it, didn’t you? Now. Hand it over, and I’ll even let you keep the rest of your shit. Otherwise...”

He slowly slid his index finger across his throat.

With a lightning fast motion, Mammon turned away, snatched you from his pocket, slid you INTO HIS MOUTH—

And turned back. He spoke, and his somewhat muffled works vibrates around you as you sat in the pocket of his cheek, saliva pooling around you.

“About thaft—shorry, but tat human wash my lunch today, sho no can do!”

You squirmed, kicking Mammon in the teeth, and instinctively he put his hand to his face, pressing against you in your fleshy pocket.

“Yeah right. It’s in your mouth. Spit it out.”

With an abrupt motion, you were sucked back out from Mammon’s cheek, and brought back into his tongue. It ran over you a few times, almost hesitantly, before you felt his head tilt back and...

He swallowed.

You were pulled downward, legs first, into Mammon’s throat, which then squeezed and squashed you downward. As soon as the pressure let up, you gasped, splashing downward, hearing Mammon sigh in relief along with you. Where you were now—his stomach, was glowing a faint gold in some spots, giving you a good look at your surroundings. It was roomier than one might think, rippled and moving and alive...

You snapped back to reality as you heard him speak again.

“Like I said, no can do! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m outta here.”

“Yeah, no. Get him.”

Your world lurched as Mammon broke into a sprint. You weren’t too worried about his situation—Mammon’s true strength was his speed, so he’d be able to get the two himself out of this. You waited it out somewhat uncomfortably as you were tossed about (at least your surroundings were squishy) for what felt like hours but was probably more like a few minutes. Eventually, you stopped being tossed around and Mammon slowed to a jog, panting, before stopping.

“Phew. Think we lost ‘em.”

You could feel something poke you from the outside.

“Y/N? Ya doin’ alright in there?”

Now, to deal with the situation at hand.

“Mammon, why did you eat me?”

“Cause I sure as hell wasn’t gonna let those guys eat you! Listen, if anyone is gonna eat MY human, it’s gotta be me.”

The golden glow intensified around you. It must have something to do with his sin, you thought, based on how it glowed while he spoke.

“Mmhm. But if you were just going to run away anyway, you could’ve left me in your pocket, stupid.” You gave a playful kick to the spot you knew Mammon’s Hans was resting. You felt a rough jab in your general direction in response.

“Er, well—You know what? How about I just leave you there and digest you!? Yeah, that’ll show you. In fact, MAYBE that’s what I was gonna do all along!”

“Yeah, well, you keep forgetting I have a pact with you. So all I would have to do is tell you to spit me out.”

“Grr...”

“...but you know what? I’m pretty comfy. I think I don’t mind staying here for a little while while we get home.”

You could tell he was pleased, because the ripples of his stomach glowed warmly. You let yourself sink into the folds and sighed.

“Where are we, anyway? I can’t see anything in here...”

“That’s a great question.”

[shiftytracts]

Stop Wanting More, part 1 of 2 (T/M/A fic)

In which season-four Jon tries to quiet his hunger for live statements by gorging himself on paper ones, and Daisy tells him what she used to do when she got shaky between hunts. Part two here.

…For almost ten thousand words (~5.1k in this half, ~4.3 in the other), beeeecause of course I did.

Content warnings:

Disordered eating (mainly of the statement variety, but mentions also the literal kind)

Nausea, and brief descriptions of prior vomiting

Brief but not-ungraphic description of Jon’s (canon) Boneturning incident—so, injury, very mild body horror

Vague discussion of Daisy’s passive suicidality (in part two)

Animal cruelty and death: Daisy talks about hunting rats for sport (in part two)

—

Jon paused the tape recorder, closed his eyes, and tried to breathe. A statement’s second-to-last page was the hardest to get down. The dull ache that had begun under his ribs twenty minutes before now stretched down far enough to converge with the one in his stiff hips. His pulse throbbed in his stomach; he could feel it swell and recede beneath his hand with every beat. Nausea boomeranged up from somewhere under his navel. He reminded himself he could stop for now, finish this later—and, as always, that thought made him feel even colder than the sludge of other people’s fear pooling in his stomach. With his free hand Jon pressed Record again, and turned to 0101702’s final page. Oh, god, there was barely anything on it. Just the rest of this paragraph and then one more. He kept his eyes on the page, didn’t stop speaking its words, but fumbled blindly for another statement with his fingers.

“Knock knock,” Daisy said as she entered. “Christ—you’re still recording?”

In a flash Jon folded his hands on the table, sat up a little straighter, tried to suck in his gut. “Er—”

“Thought you said you were gonna do one more.”

“I’m almost done.”

“You’ve got another one right there.”

“I…” he considered I’m sorry, but then she’d say For what. “I don’t know what to tell you. It is my office.”

“Yeah, and your home,” Daisy scoffed—“and mine. Sort of.”

“D—did you want…? You’re welcome, to. Sit down, or….”

She did, on the arm of his couch. “I know, Jon. That’s not what I meant.”

“Okay.” To show he’d meant his welcome, Jon pushed his chair back from his desk and turned in it to face Daisy. Hopefully she’d remember he couldn’t ask What did you mean.

“I mean, don’t pretend this is work. How many statements have you had today? You don’t think that one can wait til tomorrow?”

Seven? Or would this one be eight. Jon forced himself to exhale out the portion of gut he’d been holding back since she arrived; it hurt too much to keep sucking in anyway. “A lot. I’m just.”

“Hungry, yeah.”

“Even when I’m stuffed I’m hungry.” He snarled a laugh, and set a rueful hand over his stomach like a fig leaf.

At first he’d tried sating the hunger with garden-variety food. That didn’t help much. Way back when he’d first transferred to the Archives Jon had fallen back into the old habit of forgetting to eat—which, yeah, not great, but, it did mean he remembered well how amazing it used to feel to cram down even a stale biscuit after too many hours’ inanition. All the hidden notes he’d found in yogurt and dry toast. He even remembered tearing up once at the taste of a banana, early in 2016. Before that he’d been sure he didn’t like bananas; afterward, for a short while he’d eaten one nearly every day, hoping vainly to recapture the ecstasy of banana after 14-hour fast. No luck, of course. After a few weeks he’d concluded he still didn’t much like banana as final course of healthy lunch. He’d especially disliked peeling them: how sometimes the stems bent without breaking, and the more times you tried the warmer, softer, more flexible they got. How little strings of peel still clung to the banana after you peeled off its main body, like static when you pull off a jumper. Or like the lint it leaves behind on your shirt. And the way bananas bruise, like people do. All these vestiges of its previous life—reminders it had lived to feed itself rather than him.

Since the coma, all people food—er. That was, all food intended for human consumption—tasted like that chase after a faded spark. Cloying and mushy and… organic, reminding him too much of the garden it came from. And the way it landed in his stomach was far worse. The original banana, the one Martin had pressed on him in the Archives in April 2016, had gone down like nectar, ambrosia, manna from heaven, &c.; the ones afterward, like an unwanted dessert always does. (Cloying. Mushy. A biology lesson mildly tapping its watch.) These days, though, eating regular dinner on a stomach empty of other people’s trauma felt like trying to fill up on cake. Not like cake after fourteen hours of nothing; Jon was pretty sure his 2016 stomach would have welcomed that. But like cake at dinner time. When you’re expecting, you know. Dinner. It gave him the brief, fake-seeming energy of a sugar high, and made him sick before it made him full.

Especially when he was otherwise ailing, for some reason? After Hopworth he’d treated himself to a lie down and a sandwich. The rest had helped, but he’d squandered most of the energy it gave him on the effort to keep the sandwich down. At that moment nothing, not even the coffin, had scared him so much as the thought of what it would feel like to throw up when you had only ten ribs on one side. He hadn’t expected losing them to hurt, at least not for long—had expected the rib to flow out of his skin into Jared Hopworth’s hand like an ice cube through water, which in retrospect was stupid given the testimony of Mr. Pryor in statement 0081103, but he hadn’t had time to reread that one beforehand and at the time Jon remembered only that Hopworth didn’t break his victims’ skin when he pulled out their bones. Turned out that wasn’t much comfort: he’d still had to break the ligaments attaching Jon’s ribs to his spine and chest. It had felt like a bad dislocation (four of them, technically), only instead of the feeling of bone pressing on things it shouldn’t there was an equally violating sense of tissue wallowing in holes that shouldn’t be there. He’d had this horror that if he were sick the flesh would crumple and pop where his ribs used to be, like when you try to suck the remaining water out of a near-empty bottle.

A few months after that he’d caught cold. (A point in the still-human column, Daisy had called it.) You know the first day or two of a cold, before the encroaching mucus takes out your ability to smell or taste properly, how innocuous olfactory phenomena like cheddar and laundry soap suddenly become Bad Smells, on par with the olive bar at a posh supermarket? Well, in a similar way, this one seemed to sharpen the dichotomy in his body’s opinions of people food and monster food. His lack-of-ribs had mostly healed by then though, so either vomiting with only ten ribs on one side did not cause the anomaly he’d feared, or, if it did, it hadn’t hurt enough for him to notice it in the cacophony (pucophony?) of other sensations.

(Daisy liked to play on words, so he’d been doing it more lately. This project the Eye seemed happy to help with, though in this case the suggestion arrived in his mind at the exact same moment as a reminder that, technically, the word cacophony can apply to sensations other than sound only by synecdoche.)

And then, a few weeks ago, when the whole Archives went down with norovirus… well, it wasn’t a fun time. He’d at first mistook the lethargy, weakness, trouble concentrating for signs of hunger—the new kind of hunger. Ms. Mullen-Jones’ statement about the Divine Chains cult hadn’t seemed all that bad, when he’d first recorded it. Scarier than if he’d read its events in a novel, of course; that was just how statements worked. He experienced them more vividly than stories, though less so than the events of his own life. (Because the people they happened to thought they were real! he’d told himself when he first took this job. It’s empathy, that’s all. Nope, sorry—evil magic.) When he read a paper statement these days, though, the knowledge it wouldn’t give him nightmares never quite left him. And he’d thought he was growing desensitized to the kinds of horror most people came to the Institute to report. Coming back up, though—maybe it was the fever, but god, the visions he got on that statement’s way out, of Agape and the soft, sticky hivecorpse of Claude Vilakazi’s followers—the way it made the donut he’d shoved down that morning (in a show of team spirit, god help him) come back up tasting like rotten rice wine—it was worse than the dreams. Worse, he could have sworn, than even the first time he ever dreamt Naomi Herne’s empty graveyard.

While hanging over the bowl of the Archives’ toilet waiting to see if he’d got it all up or if there was still more to come, Jon remembered thinking again of the banana Martin had given him. A few days earlier Daisy had made him watch the video of the I don’t understand this meme and at this point I’m too afraid to ask man vore-ing a banana; Jon had confessed to her, in a conspiratorial whisper-laugh, that for him vore itself had been one such meme until that very second, when the Eye had seen fit to inform him. But when applied to a banana, the term apparently just meant eating it peel and all. In 2016 Martin had broken the banana’s stem and pulled back a section of peel before handing it to Jon, so as to brook no argument. Was it really the banana itself he’d cried over? Not the gesture of friendship, when Jon deserved it so little? The thought of someone caring for him enough that when he got hangry at them they handed him a snack. Martin had been living in the Archives then, like Jon did now. Sleeping in Document Storage—a guest in a room owned by pieces of paper. Those bananas may have been the only thing that felt like his.

A Guest for Mr. Spider was about vore, technically. Not an uncommon topic in children’s literature. Some surmised that was where the fetish came from, though others maintained kinks like that were inborn, and the stories merely alerted their hosts to them for the first time. Red riding hood, three little pigs, little old lady who swallowed a fly. The Leitner touch was only the part where he drew you to his real-life lair and real-life ate you.

Looking back, that was probably the first thing he’d ever admired about Martin—how easy he’d made it look to skin a fruit. Not at the time admired, of course, but in those weeks afterward, when every banana Jon ate made him claw at the peel til his finger joints throbbed.

That stomach bug had struck the Archives with serendipitous timing, though. If he’d not found out how thin abstinence from the Hunt had made Daisy on the same day he’d barfed up a statement, Jon might not have pieced together what their combined evidence meant. Until then he’d put down his own post-coma weight loss to the fact he rarely ate more people food than a donut in twenty-four hours. Lots of avatars were scrawny, after all. Jane Prentiss, Mike Crew, Justin Gough, Annabelle Cane, John Amherst, Simon Fairchild. Jude Perry and Jared Hopworth could mold their respective fleshes however they wanted, so he didn’t count them as exceptions. True, Trevor Herbert’s bulk had struck him as odd; surely a homeless man wouldn’t waste cash on food his body no longer wanted. And what about Breekon and Hope? Did butterflies and a quartermaster’s pen and tongue sustain them? But maybe, Jon had told himself, it was like with alcohol. Maybe the avatars with more flesh on their bones had worked to develop a tolerance for (air quotes, heavy sarcasm) people food, for the sake of their physiques, or. So they could, he didn't know, eat socially? Without feeling sick, like Jon did whenever one of the others brought donuts.

Preposterously stupid, this theory seemed in retrospect. The truth was much simpler. It was like Jude Perry’d told him. She was strong and he was weak, because she fed her god with her actions, while Jon’s had had to resort to eating his flesh.

He wasn’t going back to live statements! That wasn’t an option; he knew that. He couldn’t feed his god with his actions. But he could have more paper ones. Maybe they were like the candles poor Eugene Vanderstock used to bring Agnes—the ones she’d sat over for hours. Hours and hours, inhaling the suffering that made them. They’d kept her strong enough, right? At least in body. All those people in charge of her care, all so much in her thrall—if she’d looked hungry one of them would’ve mentioned it in a statement.

During Jon’s school days, back when he was still trying to learn how to be a girl, this brief window had opened up right around age thirteen where the girls around him had enough self-consciousness to start developing eating disorders? But not enough to keep them secret. Thirteen had been this phase of, like, I’m a teenager now, see? I’ve got the teen angst now—SEE?! Where after they’d finished the day’s maths assignment, or while setting up microscope slides, one could overhear girls swapping self-harm anecdotes and tips for how best not to eat. Anne, whom he’d been almost friends with, went through two packs of chewing gum a day for a while. She would shove three or four sticks at a time in her mouth, then spit them back out into their wrappers as soon as they lost their flavor. Eventually they made her sick, and she switched to chain-sucking butterscotch discs. (Most artificial sweeteners, as the Eye now informed him, had mild laxative properties—including those used in gum.) Other acquaintances had brought comically large thermoses of coffee to school every day, and scurried to the toilet between classes. But it was another polyurious crowd that Jon kept thinking of, these days—the kids who would chug water every time they felt hungry. Trying to fill up on paper statements felt just like that.

He’d never understood that urge until now. Hunger was already a bad sensation; why would it help to add the further bad sensations of nausea and stomachache and cold? But now it made sense: feeling better was not the point. The point was to stop wanting more. He couldn’t get rid of the hunger, exactly—not in a way that mattered. Not the shards of glass in his belly, not the itch in his esophagus like a finger tapping behind his gag reflex, not the way simple motions like soaping his hands made his whole body ache. Not the sharpening of his senses to such a fine point that he jumped whenever Thérèse in the office above him shut her desk’s sticky drawer. (He hadn’t known that was what made the squeaky noise until a few weeks ago when the Eye decided he might like some office gossip. Even now he didn’t know which of the faces he sometimes passed up there belonged to Thérèse. She had no statements to make.) Nor the fog in his mind, though he tried sometimes to blame that on the Lonely. He couldn’t sate his hunger with paper statements—couldn’t make himself full, in the rosy way we usually connote that word. All warm and carefree and pleasantly sleepy. But he could cram the hole inside him with enough stale horrors that the temptation to chase down a fresh one momentarily left him.

And that was the new plan—to stuff himself with paper statements.

Tomorrow would mark two weeks since the day he’d first tried it. Brian from Artefact Storage had a statement to give him, Jon could feel—either Stranger or Spiral, it was hard to tell quite which. Something that caused paranoia. Not a great fit for that department. Good fit for a temple of the Eye, Jon supposed, remembering Tim and Michael Shelley. But Artefact Storage? God help him. He wondered if Elias had done it on purpose, hiring a paranoid man to work in a room full of objects that wanted him hurt. If so it must’ve been this one—this purpose. And on Wednesday mornings Brian manned the place all alone. Poor soul was already clinging to this job by a thread, though (so, Web…? That could cause paranoia too, as Jon well knew). Surely if Jon made him relive his trauma that would break it. Though perhaps that’d be a mercy. And but besides, two weeks ago Melanie had still lived here, and sat all morning between Jon’s office and Artefact Storage. Until she went to lunch. But by that time the woman whose laugh Jon could sometimes hear through the walls (Pooja, the Eye had since told him her name was) would have joined Brian. And it’d just be too weird, too risky, to go in and ask him about it with a third person in the room. Even if it wasn’t also evil.

So he’d read 0132210—the statement of Sierra Talbot, regarding a swimming pool whose depth changed every time she entered it—in hopes that’d make him quit thinking about the paranoid man down the hall. It didn’t, not really; paper statements didn’t take up as much of his attention as they used to. But he couldn’t get up and walk to Artefact Storage in the middle of one. When he finished and still couldn’t think of anything but Brian, he dug out another statement (this one from 1938, regarding a bad penny). Just to keep himself chained to his desk til lunch. And then a third (Liza Ho, attack of the killer seagulls). And by the end of that one he felt too heavy and cold inside to want to go anywhere but the couch. It made his stomach swell until it hurt to sit up straight, and the thought of shoving anything more inside made him feel sick—exactly like chugging water every time he felt hungry.

Basira had said maybe the Web just wanted to keep them so afraid of their own impulses they sat and did nothing so they couldn’t be puppeted. Maybe she was right. He’d never felt more like a spider, with his weak, skinny limbs and bloated stomach. Lying on the couch massaging other people’s horrors into more comfortable shapes inside him. Thank god he’d already given up tucking in his shirts, when he came back after the coma. Jon had worn the same trousers for three days in a row, now—shucked them off at the end of the day, hoping if he left them on the floor that’d convince him they were too dirty to wear again, and then slipped them back on over clean boxers in the morning. They were the only trousers he had that stayed up with the button left unfastened.

(Technically, the noun bloat refers to the feeling of weight or tightness in the abdomen. To describe a belly which has expanded beyond its typical size, one should use the word distended. Though these phenomena can occur separately, most people conflate them under the single word bloated. This trivia had seemed worthless when Beholding told him of it. But now he knew better. Every morning he woke up feeling like he’d had his whole torso replaced with the aching void of space, empty but for silver glints of pain that were the stars. And then he’d look down and find his belly still distended.)

Melanie and Basira didn’t know—at least not officially. They both seemed to have noticed how much more often lately they’d walked in on him recording, but Jon was pretty sure they suspected him less of bingeing on statements, more of pretending to record so as to avoid talking to them. He welcomed this misapprehension.

It was also possible they knew but declined to comment, since. Well, it was kind of a pathetic habit? Physically, a bit pathetic. Morally, though, such a big improvement over compelling statements by force that maybe they figured they ought to let him have it. If so he should be grateful, he reminded himself. Their pity, after all, was humiliating only in principle; Daisy’s teasing and concerned questions embarrassed him in practice.

“Enough navelgazing,” Daisy scoffed, but when Jon looked over at her he could see a smile creeping its way onto her face. “Look—finish the one you’re on, then come over here and I’ll. Tell you a story.”

“I—what?”

“Don’t know if it’ll count as a ‘statement,’” she said, with air quotes; “not much fear in it, more just.” She looked at the floor, then shrugged. “But it seems worth a try, yeah? Might make you feel better.”

“I-I, er. I really shouldn’t?” He meant in case it had a taste of human blood effect, but set his hand on his stomach again in hopes she’d think he meant he was too full.

“Yeah, you should. I want you to hear it.” Daisy shrugged again. “Think it might do you good to know.”

Jon turned back to his desk, unpaused the recording and wrapped up the statement. He’d quit bothering to record end notes on most of these—told himself he could add them in later, like he used to when he’d first taken this job. How proud 2016 Jon would have been to see how many statements the 2018 Archivist got through in a week.

He paused for a moment before standing up, to take as deep a breath as he could manage when stuffed full of paper. The end of that statement had gone down easier, since he’d had that few minutes’ break talking to Daisy, but he still didn’t love the idea of standing and walking. Especially since he knew once he got to the couch he’d be glued there by fatigue. If he didn’t pee now, he’d spend most of the night far enough into sleep to be paralyzed, but not far enough to numb his bladder. He excused himself to Daisy, promising to come right back. Then hauled himself up, with help from his cane and one arm of his chair.

Six limbs it took to maneuver this body now. Two more and he’d’ve gone full spider.

Three quarters of the way to the bathroom—that’s how long it took before the ache in his legs outpaced that in his stomach. He arrived on the toilet seat shaky and out of breath, as always. Months ago he’d given up standing to pee. When you sat you could rock back and forth, and cross your arms tight over waves of quease.

Not much came out, as was also usual lately. As far as Jon could tell, his body now required only enough water to keep his mouth from drying out while recording. Dehydration no longer made his head hurt, so, why bother. Good thing, too, he supposed—the last two weeks he hadn’t needed much non-metaphorical water inside for his body to parse that as needing to pee.

He let his trousers stay pooled around his ankles until after he’d washed and dried his hands. Then pulled up his shirt, to judge from his reflection whether they’d stay up with the fly undone. If he kept his hands in his pockets, yeah. Could you tell the difference, visually, once he put his shirt tails back down? Not for such a short distance. They wouldn’t have time to get disarranged.

It didn’t matter; Basira didn’t even glance at him on his way back, and all Institute staff who didn’t live here had gone home.

Jon opened the door to his office, said hello to Daisy but didn’t manage to look at her, and sat himself down on the other side of the couch. From the corner of his eye (or someone’s anyway) he saw her rise to her feet. “I’m gonna pee too,” she told him, picking her way toward the door; “get yourself comfortable, like you’re going to bed.”

“Where will you sit.”

“I’ll squeeze in.”

“I don’t mind leaving room for—?” Finally he made himself look up at her, in time to see her shake her head. Daisy hadn’t been strong on her feet either, since the Buried; she held herself up now with a hand on the doorjamb, elbow bent so her shoulder leant against that wrist. He regretted quibbling. “Never mind; I’ll just.”

“Really? You’re comfortable like that? You look like a sheep in clover.”

The knowledge came to him before he could ask her what that meant—complete with a nasty visual of what happens in cases acute enough to require rumenotomy. Jon swore he could feel himself swelling to accommodate this tidbit. His eye twitched in discomfort.

“Think I prefer ‘windbag,’ if it’s all the same to you.”

She made a face like that was grosser than what she had said. “You ruined my joke. I was gonna say I won’t let you have any more leaves til you look less like you might explode.”

“Sheep in clover suffocate,” Jon frowned; “they don’t explode. You must be thinking of how they cure them when—”

“Leaves. In. A. Book, Jon. That joke.”

“Oh. Yes, I see.” He made himself chuckle.

Daisy sighed and shifted on her feet. “I’ll be right back. Just lie down, alright? Like you’re going to bed.”

Jon agreed to lie down, but couldn’t decide whether to face the wall (as he would to sleep), leaving her to slide in between him and the back of the couch the way she had a few times before when she’d walked in on him catnapping, or whether he should lie on his back, where he could see her as soon as she opened the door. It was important to make sure she knew he appreciated her offer to give him a statement. Or, no—to tell him her story, he meant.

Ultimately he picked the latter course.

“You sleep like that?”

“Sometimes."

“I’ve never seen you sleep like that. You always face the wall.” Daisy crossed her arms, blew hair out of her face. “That for the tummy ache, or for me?”

“Uh….”

“Would it hurt you to face the wall.”

“No, I just.”

“Turn around, then. I’ll squeeze in,” she said again.

“I-if you’re sure.”

He rolled onto his side, gritting his teeth as the cramps in his stomach swirled in new directions. What made it slosh like that, he wondered. While he fought to regain his breath Jon watched Daisy climb up onto the back of the couch on shaking elbows and knees, then avalanche down hands- and feet-first so she fit between him and its cushions. He’d never watched her do this before—always either startled out of a doze at the sound of her thumping down next to him, or simply woken up to find her there.

“You’re just like the Admiral,” he informed her.

“True words spoken in jest,” muttered Daisy. Too quietly for him to hear what she said over the couch’s tortured creaks, but half a second after she finished speaking the words appeared before his mind, in white, all-capital letters with a black background like closed captions on the news. “That’s Georgie’s cat, right?” she said aloud.

“Yes.”

Her knee jostled the cap of his; when it made him gasp she snarled under her breath. “Sorry. Can you move your leg?”

“Yes, it’s fine, just—”

“I mean would you move your leg.”

“Oh.” He did so.

“Thanks. Ugh—you’re cold,” Daisy accused him; “where’s that blanket.” He pointed behind her to the arm of the couch where it lay folded. She shook it out, and draped it over both of them. Reached around behind him to make sure it covered his whole back. Jon tried to ignore the way his stomach lurched every time Daisy’s weight shifted against the cushions. Finally she settled next to him to catch her breath. Their foreheads touched; her stomach pressed into his, though not as tightly as the last time they’d lain like this. “Can you breathe or am I crushing you?”

“Not at all, you’re fine—in fact, if the couch cushions are chafing you too much you can—”

Daisy huffed, and scooted herself in closer to him. “That better?” She set her warm hand down right where his belly diverged from pelvis. Jon tried to keep both voice and tremor out of his exhale. Since the coffin, Daisy’s hands and feet suffered at night and after any exertion from the same excess of heat his sometimes did. So the cold inside him probably felt nice on her hand, if not to the rest of her.

(Like snuggling up to a hotel mattress, she’d described it, after the first time she joined him for a nap when he’d just had a statement. Cold, hard, covered in lumps and dents, and creaks when you roll over on it. “I’d prefer you didn’t,” he’d replied, while praying her elbow wouldn’t come any closer to the crevasse where his ribs used to be.)

“Christ you’re stuffed,” commented Daisy. For emphasis she lifted her fingers, then set them back down on his gut.

“I don’t know what you expected.”

“You won’t pop if I tell you a story?”

“Not literally,” Jon said, blinking.

“Of course not literally,” she scoffed; “you know what I mean.”

“Do I?”

“Will it make you sick. Don’t want you throwing up on me; this is Melanie’s shirt. If you ruin it she’ll hit us with her cane, and I don’t trust you to hit as hard back with yours.”

“Mine’s shorter and thicker,” he mused. “I don’t have to hit as hard.”

“Stop. Avoiding. The question.”

Jon sighed to show her he capitulated. Then thought about it. He felt cold and sick, but the idea of saying no to a statement made those feelings worse, not better. And the sharp clusters of pain in his belly were harder to sleep through than quease.

“I’ll be fine,” he decided. “It’ll help.”

“Alright. When you’re ready, ask me what I used to do when I got shaky between hunts.”

--

Read part two here.

[twitchesandstitches]

Average Day for Hyper Muscle Polypa

commission for a slice of life story featuring the hyper amazonian and muscle gut Polypa from one of my most frequent comm-ers!

Features hyper muscle, mini-giantess aspects, and a vore scene later on.

--------

It took some time for the mutated troll woman, Polypa Gozee, to wake up all the way. She rolled and shifted around in her recuperacoon for a while, her impossibly muscular and oversized body straining the poor device’s ability to contain her. The questionably fleshy recuperacoon’s surface was strained particularly hard by one especially huge lump forcing out its front, and two significantly smaller (but still quite big) spheres on top of that. As she woke up, they shifted heavily, forced this way and that way as she slowly got to her feet inside the sopor slime. And then, she yawned heavily, so hard that the windows of her hive almost rattled. And then, there was a gurgling growl from her massive stomach that did make the windows shake almost out of their frames, and the sound knocked down a couple trolls who had been walking past the huge and overbuilt complex of her hive.

It was surprisingly large for an oliveblood, who never got the kind of resources for something like that. But when it came to questions about Polypa, her hive being too big was really the least of it.

And in any case, even her hive, engineered as it was to cope with her unique and empire-compliant mutations, couldn’t quite cope with the kind of power even her hungry rumblings could perform.

Consider a view through her hive, through its many winding hallways, its twisting corridors, the walls with handholds put into them near furniture at just the right angle for beings of a considerably smaller size to move up, and a general sense of scale. Walking into this home was a bit like being transported into a world where you were suddenly far smaller than you ought to be; everything suddenly looked massive.

It was also the home of a fangirl, it seemed. Finished assembly kits for many different series lined the shelves end to end, arranged into complicated dioramas telling their own self-contained stories. Models and miniatures, patiently handpainted with a few sloppy mis-strokes that indicated someone not well suited to precise movements, occupied display shelves.

And the scale of the rooms, and its furniture, were massive. Most trolls were giants compared to the unfortunate aliens they met, save perhaps for the mineral entities known only as the Gems, and the titanic shapeshifting robots known as the Autobots, whom had called an alliance together specifically to stonewall the Condesce so badly that in her frustration she had postponed her eternal conquest and allowed the adult trolls to return to Alternia, to repopulate and bide their time. And even so, the size of these rooms would make even the biggest troll brute feel like a lost infant wriggler. A chair alone, for instance, was more than ten feet across (by the measurements of humans, at least), and higher than most trolls were tall.

The walls were decorated in the colorful and bright shades of various animated series, some fairly obscure and some autographed in the careful, pictogram calligraphy of the written languages in the regions they had originated in. Most of these were of cute characters, with incredibly buxom, amazonian troll-women as the primary focus; given that the cultural expectation was for women to be more ruthless, cruel and ferocious than the smaller and frailer men, they also tended to be somewhat bloody and gory. Even the cutesy and lighthearted shows featured at least a few bloody heads on pointy sticks here and there. Fuchsia princesses predominated, their frilly dresses and armored attire suggesting a few popular trends from a troll genre broadly similar to the romantic and self-discovery of human shoujo series, but other posters, as well as a truly shocking breadth of collectable miniatures, models and dioramas constructed from those very collectibles, had the softer and more stylized looks of something like action-packed shonen series.

(Those were not quite the same terms as trolls themselves would have used, but in lieu of direct translations, those terms suffice to get the general vibe of those genres across.)

It bore some repeating that the collectibles weren’t just fairly diverse, but they were hand-painted, though not handcrafted. They’d clearly been bought from a store or assembled from kits, but they had been painted at home, with a lot of love, if not necessarily a lot of skill. They were something of a contrast to the bloody trophies kept in little glass desks throughout the home, like a predator’s way of saying ‘heck yeah, I killed THAT’.

They were unlabeled, preserved in jars and transparent boxes and even living jelly spheres that kept particularly brief things going, but they were clearly trophies from dead trolls. A broken horn there, its base scarred by some kind of horribly vicious digestive fluid that still tinted it olive-green. Several orange-red bones, preserved in fluid. More than one or two skulls, and there weren’t many of these larger trophies. There were necklaces and bracelets of teeth presumably taken from dead jaws, torn out and strung up, and it was always one tooth per kill. There were many necklaces, a bit bloody from their original owners, mostly in the colder shades.

There was another oddity of them; the hive was mainly made of a blend of the various living substances trolls built their homes out of, interlaced with a tough resin that was pretty similar to some plastics and provided al ot of structural strength, and the composite was a hardly material that would gradually heal most damage done to it. It was, after all, a living thing. However, this hive’s walls were coated in a glassy substance often used in fireproofing; it had a very high melting point, and saw a lot of industrial use. It protected the cases all her books, movies, animations and various collectibles were all set in, and the impression was that she was worried about fires. There were still a few scorch marks, here and there, in the shape of handprints and footprints.

Now, consider her bedroom.

It was a surprisingly small space. There were fewer collectibles and trophies compared to the rest of her home, and only a few photos. Most of those were on a small desk on the other side of the room from her recuperacoon, and generally showed her with the long-dead lusus who had raised her from wrigglerhood. There was one photo from before her adult molts, with her moirail Tegiri. The photo showed her towering over him even them, one buff arm looped around his neck, him with a stoic expression of long-suffering complacence, and the other photos of them largely followed this trend, even some of the more recent ones that had so much trouble fitting her into frame. Besides them were the ashes of her lusus, preserved in a jar. They were positioned in a way that the sleeper would immediately see them as soon as she woke up.

Most of the room was otherwise taken up by a monstrously huge recuperacoon; a gigantic cocoon, oozing a green ooze with sedative qualities to soothe the mindness rage and lust for blood inflicted upon trolls by mysterious entities in the distant past. It filled up the entire room, which was still a fairly large room despite being small by the hive’s general template standards, and was filled nearly to capacity by a very big, extremely feminine, and rather rigidly built body that had been tossing and turning for some time.

A pair of horns poked out the ground; using human measurements and scaling them up to troll size, they would perhaps have been about five feet long each and two feet wide, from a height of nearly 20 feet, bringing the height of the recuperacoon and its occupant at around 25 feet, by the measurements of trolls (which used different terminology, but was fairly close to the human Imperial measurements).

Both horns extended at an angle, branching into heavy hooks, and one had a large chunk broken out of it, still raw and green all these molts later. They rose up as Polypa groggily stood up to her full height in a slow and groggy way, her amazon figure looking like something being constructed out of the cocoon. It became clear, as the huge distensions at the front moved upwards, and the cocoon shrank inwards as more Polypa rose up, that it was almost all her. Massive shoulders rose out of the cocoon, each one at least a few feet around and looking even bigger from inhuman levels of muscular development; alien analogues to deltoids extending at least a foot away from her in ropey curls, the chitinous armor of her black skin adhering to her form as closely as latex.

The first impression of her was ‘no troll should be that big’. Her presence was a physical force, distorting attention around her like a lead weight shot of a cannon into a wall. The second impression was of sheer, unbelievable muscle mass, swelling out of her to such an extreme that it was hard to tell what was actually her main body, and what was muscle grown so huge and heavy that it had swelled out into a kind of meaty carapace.

Polypa kept rising upwards, and the two huge lumps surged out as a pair of gigantic rumble-spheres, or breasts by human nomenclature; if her belly had been slimmer, they would have dipped down all the way to her thighs, heavy and laden with some form of nectar. Certainly her nipples (or sap ducts, as trolls considered them) were enormously huge, puffy and ready to disgorge into a receptive mouth. Each rumble-sphere was wider than the entire circumference of her body by a foot or so, and would likely have projected out by eight feet, at the least.

They nonetheless looked small compared to her belly, which was the much larger lump beneath her boobs. It flopped out through the lip of the cocoon, which made it deflate and contract in relief around the rest of her admittedly still gargantuan body like a living film. Her stomach surged out and smacked heavily into the ground, denting the floor beneath it, and settled; all of Polypa’s body, nude as she was in the sopor, was absurdly muscular, her body mutated to increase her muscle development to the point that most of her apparent mass was…

Well. Very little of it was her actual body. She was a massive troll even for her size, but most of her bulk was just muscle mass grown straight from her body. Her head, dwarfed by her growth, poked out like someone piloting a mech made of muscles, and seemed startlingly small compared to her overall size.

This beefy carapace was bulkiest around a few specific areas, such as her arms and legs, but nowhere was more heavily muscled than her stomach. Round though it was, abdominal muscles completely encased it, so solidly defined they looked like carved markings on an anatomical engraving; latissimus dorsi like slabs lined the sides beneath her rumble-spheres, external oblique were a muscular rim jutting out over even her enormous hips, and her abdominals proper stuck out so much that they made her belly a surprisingly gravid globe.

That it was nearly as long as she was tall, and wider besides, gave such an awe-inspiring sense of mass. It gurgled faintly, mysterious chemical processes going on in that magnificent gut; it was the secret to her tremendous growth, it's perfect digestion breaking down all food and turning it into raw mass to fuel her increased size and muscle mass. Bones, trees, poisonous fungi, other trolls; if it was organic, Polypa could digest it and neutralize all poison, making them all nothing but fuel for her magnificent form.

It was quite sensitive, to boot; Polypa shivered as her nook and bulk (both swollen to extreme heaviness beneath her belly) rammed into its lower regions, and she grinded her hips into it as an automatic reflex, enjoying a particular abdominal crease she clenched around herself right there, and spent about five minutes ramming into herself, until the early morning lust resolved itself, and her head cleared.

Polypa stepped out of her cocoon, thighs nearly eight feet across and as hyper muscular as the rest of her moved out, her digitigrade legs flexing and the clawed toes powering her out of the cocoon. A short, slim tail bulging with more muscle slapped against a huge butt rather softer-looking than the rest of her body. Her mane of hair fluttered down, messy from the sopor and sliding against her butt too.

Sopor slime dripped off her face, off the scars. The burns were terrible, distorting almost all her face except for a small circle around one eye into a mass of off-green crags and pinched sections, the chitin there half-melted. Even her lips, massively puffy and swelling outwards, had uncomfortable streaks tinting them a faint green from those old injuries. The burns continued down her neck, at least until the swelling piles of her neck muscles swallowed them up.

The chitinous carapace of much of her body still bore some sign of those old burns, all the same. Down her back, a meandering trail across her arms, erratically spiraling around the base of her tail, and a few dappled spots on her thighs and finally the heavy tread of her feet, and even that was still scarred by old fire.

And as she walked out, her body shimmered, psionic energies in her eyes, and heat pulsed out from her hard enough to nearly evaporate the slime off her body on the spot.

With a grumble, Polypa sloughed off, dripping sopor slime off her nude body all the way to the showers, her digitigrade paws scraping her short claws against the ground, and her tail dragging behind to make little trails in that slime behind her.

The shower woke her up a little bit, though it wasn’t easy. Polypa didn’t do well in confined spaces, and even if her shower had been built for over a couple dozen trolls (if they didn’t mind getting unnecessarily intimate), she filled it pretty much to capacity. Her stomach did, mostly, which was the main issue. She kept bumping into things as the water washed the slime off her, and she hissed with suppressed pleasure as her stomach ground sensually into the hydration spigots. There was so much to… entice her. Polypa’s butt ground against the wall, her rumble-spheres were pushed into the ceiling, she had to wedge her face into those rumble-spheres just to avoid headbutting her own ceiling.

And then. Her soft and sensitive muscles pressing into each other with an overpowering friction with every other movement so that this tight space was a sweet kind of hell. And her rumble-spheres, packed tight and full as they were, kept getting pressed against each other, and her face, and the walls, and her own massive arms, and kept gushing out sparkling and frothy streams of green nectar right all over her front like a hose going off, so much that she almost screamed.

A lot of green fluids wound up washing down the drain when she was done. It wasn’t just her nectar either.

Polypa finished her shower, with some embarrassed difficulty, but figured it was best to get that sort of thing out of the way so the need as fierce as her hunger or various other cravings didn’t overwhelm her during her morning run.

A small towel hung by the shower, far too small to dry her off. And the reason why became clear, in this bathroom with the walls so very heavily reinforced by fire-preventing slabs. Heat pulsed from Polypa, and she felt her muscles swell up a bit as she tapped into just a small store of the psionic powers unlocked by her mutations. It was enough for her rather singular talent.

There was probably a technical term for it. In plain terms, she burst into flames.

Heat swirled around her as she glowed, her scars shining even brighter so that their ragged dips and swirls looked like mystical runes, and then she ignited completely, flames exploding from her. It whirled around her like an aura, blasting into every inch of the room with so much force that it was like an explosion going off. The room was reinforced to deal with it, and there was no damage caused.

After a few moments of this, Polypa shut it off. The flames that her body was continously creating and converting raw psionic energy into fire simply went out. She was left still smoking, an exhiliaration and rush still pulsing in her, and there was a faint steam from all the water being evaporated right off of her.

Polypa thought to get dressed, but the pressure in her rumble-spheres demanded otherwise.

She left her bathroom and went to a storage cabinet in one of her hallways. With a stoic expression, she hauled out a milker and slapped its cups to her engorged nipples, her rumble-spheres still totally full, and powered it on as she did her stretches: she bent low, tensing her back and adjusting her back shell and twisting her muscles in various directions, as the milker went to work. She panted in relief and pleasure, both from the feeling of her muscles working, and the sweet delight of being milked.

She twisted her arms up, one after another, and they were massive, broader across than the average troll’s entire body, her biceps nearly eight feet across each, bigger even than her torso. Her rumble-spheres bounced atop her gut, rivers of green flowing down the tubes, and she very carefully maneuvered her arms so she didn’t get lost in the moment and popped something loose; the mess would get everywhere. ...Again.

Then her hips; enormously wide even on her titanic body, swayed back and forth as she limbered up. This went on for about five minutes, and her industrial-grade milker sucked her nectar with commendable ferocity, its contents ejected in several tanks large enough to feed a dozen trolls each for a day. A large milking lusus might be expected to fill one or two a month; Polypa went through a dozen in just those five minutes alone. She kept doing more stretches, and ten minutes passed as she warmed up her body with a variety of movements to wake herself up as much as possible, until a faint burn suggested she was done.

Her belly rumbled, and a faint but demanded emptiness inside her beckoned. Polypa glanced at the many nectar tanks, and reached for the closest one.

The first to slake her hunger, but far from the last. A body like hers demanded a lot of food.

-----

A while later, her belly was stuffed with her own nectar and happily gurgling it away,, and Polypa set off at her morning run, to the expectant delight of the neighborhood.

Her belly was a bit more distended, sloshing audibly with each heavy slap against her bulbous thighs, a slight swelling in the lower regions suggesting various splinter-stomachs had been filled up and were happily digesting her breakfast. Polypa struggled to maintain her sense of decorum, frowning faintly. ‘Can’t believe I went through almost the entire morning stack’, she thought grimly, only a few of the tanks she’d produced tucked under one arm, ready to be sold.

She’d changed, too, after her milking; a sports bra did an admirable job of at least supporting her massive rumble-spheres even if it couldn’t do much to conceal the puffy juts of her nectar-ducts, and a pair of micro exercise shorts showed off her spectacular leg muscles to all their extreme spectacle. Bandages wound around her face, soaked in a sopor derivative to minimize pain to her scars, leaving only one olive-green eye to indicate her feelings. Her big lips did press against her bandages, but she rather liked the impression of that.

More bandages covered pretty much most of her limbs. It was a bit time-consuming to put them all on, but she felt much more comfortable when she had them worn. The sopor treatment kept her scars from hurting or feeling too sensitive, and it also helped her control any periodic outbursts of psionic flames if she got too worked up or surprised. The bandages wound around her arms and fists completely, thin enough to show off her build, and were a bit more sporadic around her legs. They only needed a few loops at the base of her tail, which was just as well; it was hard enough getting that covered.

The bandages had to be changed daily, and more than once Polypa considered moving in with her moirail, Tegiri. He would be happy to help her keep her bandages changed, and she did need to change them every day. It was a lovely thought, imagining him living with her and patiently working the sopor into her scars, or to cuddle him and kiss him, platonically, between his horns, a gesture so pale it almost made her blood-pusher twist in longing.

She wasn’t quite sure if she was ready for that, though.

And her flaming psionics, she thought grimly as she walked, was something to be careful about. Tegiri knew, yes, but even during her occasional expeditions into arson Polypa didn’t like anyone seeing her. Not even her enemies as she slew them. Mutations were treated leniently if you could be useful to the Empire; even something as dramatic as Polypa’s transformation was fine, as long as she could fight for her empress. Olives with psionics were rare, but not too unusual, and her muscles being produced by an excess of psionic energy made an okay explanation, but still: Polypa didn’t want to take any risks. Not to herself, not to Tegiri, not to any of her friends.

Eventually, these serious thoughts winded down, and she got to the serious work of just jogging and getting herself warmed up for the day.

As she ran, her hair swayed with the movements of her monstrously wide hips, gathered into a loose ponytail, the loose bits of mane lengths making a dramatic display against her slabbed back.

Her mouth still cold with the taste of her own delicious nectar, Polypa picked up her speed a bit, her early morning grumpiness fading into a calmer alertness. She didn’t have much to do today; she’d probably have what she euphemistically called ‘commissions’ be brought her way (and that would be another breakfast sorted out, if it happened soon), and certainly she’d meet up with Tegiri in a few hours to do some friendly shopping. There was a particular show she’d recently gotten into and she wanted more merchandise for it, though she was pretty sure Tegiri had mixed feelings on it.

He hadn’t said anything negative about it, though. He normally never held his tongue, and that was a great show of respect. She felt a bit happier thinking about that; it was good to know there were people on your team, however it was expressed.

Polypa completed a couple laps around the neighborhood block she lived, and attracted a small group of muscle enthusiasts, troll boys automatically lured to the biggest and most imposing girl around, and a few who just really wanted to try to be the ones to beat her. They might have been trying to play it cool, but their tails were whipping excitedly, smacking into each other like a little soundtrack playing for Polypa.

She did her best to mind her own business and not bother them, but she just knew they’d be fixed on her. She felt their attention refocus at every wobbling gyration of her swelling backside as her thighs beat it up and down, at the gravid thundering of her gut smacking up and down with her stride-strokes, and a great surge of pride flowed through her at this. Not so long ago, she had been a slimmer troll, and it had been hard to get noticed at all.

Now everyone noticed her. It was gratifying, to say the least.

She kept these thoughts to herself. She always did her best not to say anything to anyone at these times (unknowingly giving herself a reputation for being distant and imposing). She did love the blushes, the looks of shamed infatuation they sent towards her immense bulk and power, but she just had no idea what to do with herself then. She had little experience with it; before moving to this more upscale area, Polypa’s neighbors had generally shied away from a monster like her as a matter of common sense.

Here? People would run right up to you and dare you to snarl back, just as a challenge. Polypa was a direct troll, but she needed a bit of a run to do challenging right back; she usually approached it from the side. She always had a bit of a tense moment whenever someone approached her.

Fortunately, today she didn’t really have to do that. It was a tealblood woman, a stout and busty girl in the uniform of a legislacerator trainee outfit, that ran in a game attempt to keep up with her longer stride. Polypa didn’t know her name, just that she was a reasonably friendly neighbor. “Morning, Miss Goezee,” the competitor said politely, from somewhere around Polypa’s knee at a comfortable distance.

“Sup,” Polypa said shortly.

She noticed her early morning companion glanced up at her, and Polypa was smugly gratified to see a faint tremor in her blinking eyes. A nervous sort of look, even after her living her for half a sweep. Her eyes couldn’t keep from studying the rigid swells of Polypa’s monstrous biceps; the spiky protrusions along her chitin, and the way her chitin slotted so perfectly against the growth of her muscles. The extreme swell of her thigh muscles, her legs swinging out and then slamming back together in a shockwave that sent her belly jiggling right up and down.

Polypa put a little extra swing into it, just for an impish thrill. She had an uncanny control over her muscles, able to flex them in ways impossible for normal trolls, and she flexed at her butt at just the right time to make it wobble in every direction at once, a careful set of clinches threatening to make her sweatpants tear in very sexy ways. Her thighs swelled and contracted, muscles sliding against each other with an audible noise, veins standing out like swollen tubes against her bandages and clothing. Her tail lashed out, accidentally smacking against the tealblood’s shoulder, and then into Polypa’s enormously round bubble butt.

This went on for some time, as they ran a couple laps around the neighborhood, a sweet burn filling Polypa’s muscles with a relieving sense of exercise, the wear and tear making a strange euphoria for her. Polypa’s teasing escalating a bit, to the point that she was briefly blinded by her rumble-spheres slapping up right in front of her eye, blocking her vision, but she still had a sense of her surroundings, and she smirked smugly when the tealblood’s composure slipped, just for a moment. Polypa heard a faint panting noise from her, a sound of longing, desire, and quite a lot of envy.

“Something wrong?” Polypa said, her tone flat and calm enough that she sounded perfectly serious.

The tealblood flinched. Her tail, long and slightly broad like some kind of reptilian monster that snapped at things in rivers a lot, shook a lot with a cute wiggle at the tip. “Absolutely not, Miss Goezee! I was just…” She paused for a brief moment, just enough to sound genuine while also giving her time to come up with an excuse. “Thinking. Yes, indeed.”

Polypa chuckled, in a way conveying that she absolutely did not buy it at all. The tealblood had the dignity to at least scoff and turn her gaze pointedly aside. And, for a while, they and the small crowd of admirers and the curious that Polypa tended to accumulate like an elder god attracted worshipers carried on in silence. Companionable, between Polypa and her neighbor. Tense and adoring and lustful, from the crowd of trolls from across the hemospectrum, their shining eyes fixed on a juggling butt big enough for them to sleep on, on the undulating wobbles of a belly they could all have been sucked down into, the hypnotic wiggling of her muscle-swollen tail, and the slightest shift of her ponytail across shoulders broader than any of them were tall.

Being around them made Polypa feel bigger; it made her feel good. She wondered, sometimes, if the Condesce or her Heiresses ever felt like this, and she supposed that they were so confident and on top of the world that their baseline mood was somewhere past the soaring feeling she got when she really worked out just how much people adored her, sometimes.

Perhaps to change the subject, one of the runners spoke up, his chunky tail curled like a bit of punctuation with a tuft of fluff at the tip. He sped up just to keep pace with Polypa for a brief time; getting too close was an extremely bad idea, as with the one troll who had accidentally been hip-checked by her and had sort of… splattered. “How’d do you get your belly to stay stable like that?” He asked, apparently honestly curious.

Polypa glanced down at him, and he froze up so much he almost tripped in the resulting leg confusion. Fortunately for his dignity, he managed to keep moving. “Whaddaya mean?”

“Your stomach should be hitting the floor. It’s, big. Really, really big. How do you keep it up like this?”

“I got real good muscle control, and VERY strong belly muscles.” Polypa raised her arms up over her back, and just for a moment, relaxed. The muscles lining the side of her belly went limp, and her stomach sank against her approaching leg, kicked back into the air. Polypa winced at the sensation overload, and the heat in her hips, but she mastered it and devoted a tiny bit of concentration to her belly muscles again. They stiffened, encircling her gut like a built-in girdle or harness, and pulled up, raising her stomach to a marginally more practical level.

He goggled. “How do you even keep concentrating enough for that!?”

“It’s a gift.” She wiggled one huge claw scoldingly. “Pretty sure it's rude to ask too much about hemospectrum-compliant mutations, kiddo!” He swallowed, taking the point, and slowed down until he was again part of the crowd.

Polypa secretly crowed to herself as she passed the rest of her morning run in relative silence, the milk jugs nestled into her biceps already processed to food-quality levels by the sheer force of her body’s impact on them; she needed very sturdy containers just to survive it, and avoid additional leakings. But she loved those kinds of questions. Seeing those tiny faces off the ground, staring up at her in envy, in awe, in open admiration of her and the smallest details of her body…

She loved it. She got questions like that every day, and she had gotten good at pretending to be the confident and cool badass she assumed people expected someone as big and strong as her to be. She privately made a note to study some shows later, to really look for hints on being as cool and inspiring as possible. She was pretty sure she’d missed on the empathetic and distant vibe that she was trying really hard to project.

One by one, people peeled away, still giving her longing looks. Polypa felt a vague sense of loss, as if not having worshipful eyes on a particular part of her body at once was a physical pain to her.

Ah, well. She continued onwards, leaving her neighbor and the others behind to their own business.

-------

Her own business came up as she fitted herself, with some difficulty, into a warehouse used by an acquaintance who sold slightly illicit and moderately discouraged merchandise. She felt her palmhusk, as trolls called their equivalents to cellphones, vibrating in a concealed pocket against her vast hip, and her tail looped in to fetch it out as she dropped the milk jugs onto a counter. With a sense of irony, she peered down at a yellowblood, who put some effort to look spooky, from between her other milk jugs (to turn a phrase) and said, “The regular stuff, on demand.”

The yellowblood whistled, tapping the jug. It gave the faint echo of a container full of liquid, and he popped it open to dip a cup in. He took a swig and visibly wavered back, his tail slapping against the ground to keep him upright. “Geez, that’s almost as strong as a dose of the mind honey! Without the side effects, too.” He wiped off a smear of green nectar from his mouth and sealed the jug up again. “The stuff you bring in keeps getting thicker and stronger; I’m making a killing off it! Where the hell are you getting this stuff?”

Polypa, as far as she knew the only troll who had mutated to produce nectar in these amounts, shrugged. “Hey, don’t make me give up trade secrets, buddy.” Her palmhusk continued buzzing insistently.

“Fair enough.” He turned around and got to a load-bearer, his own mild psionics levitating the jug to it.

Polypa turned around, discreetly. The other troll’s back was turned, and she never could be too careful, given her real line of work. Her palmhusk wasn’t holding a call, just a text message. Her expression didn’t change as she saw the plain message there.

It didn’t have a return name; she made a point to avoid specific names, even from repeat commissioners. She didn’t want to get embroiled in political conflicts or highblood power struggles, or even underground revolutions she hadn’t made a choice to side with. She did what she had to, as everyone did. Nevertheless, she was pretty sure she knew this one; as usual, it was signed off with a strange sign that looked a bit like a pair of shackles, or crab’s claws.

The message, unsigned, read: ‘cerulean target. Is in your vicinity. Has unfavorable proclivities, if that mmmmatters mmmmuch for your commmmfort.’ this was followed up by a photo of a tall troll woman; her skin the deep black of a grown troll, her armor polished and chipped away as if to imply she had no need of natural protection; her claws long and thick, her fangs almost like a rainbow drinkers, and her huge belly and massive rumble-spheres so enormously swollen even in her clothes that Polypa was stunned. That was a lot of troll.

Her appetites had shifted over the years, and her belly rumbled at the sight of her… well, prey.

Polypa checked her appointment schedules, and studied the time. She calculated the odds of resolving this in, say, twenty minutes or so.

Okay, she decided. She might cut it kind of close, but she could pull it off.

She banged a hand on the counter, almost cracking it into pieces. “Gotta head off, man. See you with my next batch tomorrow!” She paused. “Um. Someone else busted up your counter!”

“No they didn’t!” he scolded her from deeper in the warehouse as she hurried away.

-------

As a rule, Polypa didn’t much like going into rich areas, even if she was big and imposing enough to pass as any shade of highblood she cared to attempt. She didn’t care much about the hemospectrum as some did, but the idea of pretending to be a colder shade just gave her the screaming willies.

For such a massive troll, Polypa moved through it in complete silence. She didn’t move in the open, either, but she climbed up sheer walls, above the oblivious highbloods and driving her claws on both hands and feet right into the plasticine exteriors, and hauling herself up. The weight of her belly pressed against the walls, and wiggling her legs underneath her stomach, provided so much leverage that she was effectively catapulting herself upwards. It was a bit of a mystery how she was able to still be silent, doing that.

Her biggest advantage, as far as potential onlookers were concerned, is that trolls didn’t often look up.

She slid against the wall, moving so smoothly and quickly she seemed to be sliding straight up it. Her inability to see over her gigantic rumble-spheres or in front of her at all from her belly, it did not hamper her very much. Polypa’s muscles weren’t just impossibly strong, flexible, or in some way fusing with her body fat, but a unique property of their outer surfaces functioned as an all purpose sensory organ. Her twitching, veiny and swollen muscles could ‘see’ as well as anything else, and given that even the compact muscles stuck out a full foot away from her body, she had a 360-degree view of everything around her, to the smallest detail.

So up she went, hopping from one wall to the next, leaving behind surprisingly little damage. These buildings were made from very high quality breeding lines of bio-structure, and they’d eventually heal the damage. Not quickly, but they would repair themselves. Holes in the wall from her claws that would heal eventually, and deeper dents where her belly had moved up there, impressions of her abs.

Polypa climbed up to the ceilings, and quietly made her way to the next rooftop, and all the while, her muscles kept twitching.  Her unique vision showed her an elaborate neighborhood of sprawling buildings and expansive complexes, most of them shining with gilt and complicated murals that advertised how fabulously rich they were.

Polypa turned her attention from the most opulent buildings to the ones that were still richer than anything she’d normally have gotten in her entire life, the ones that had a little less gold or imported coral hauled right from the seas where the Condesce supposedly had arisen like a particularly bloody-handed goddess out of ancient fables. Highbloods, as a rule, had the money to afford decorations like that as a matter of course, but the warmer their shades, the less extreme it got.

She flowed across what were probably proper blueblood homes, the wings of the mansions providing plenty of space to move skyward and get a better view for her target. She turned herself slowly, biceps swelling and pivoted in such a way that was probably a little similar to a telescope aligning itself for the best possible vision. The armored sections shone like polished latex, and she moved carefully towards manors that were less gilt-studded, but far more rich than teal homes like what Tegiri lived in.

The homes of cerulean trolls. Tradition and population distribution usually saw them living near the sea, perhaps an echo of their traditional role as naval powers, but that wasn’t really an option for the few ceruleans in subgrubs like this. That said, they tended to look a fair bit like boats that had been flipped around, and Polypa found what she was looking for sitting around all seductively near a energy-burst shop designed to look like a swashbucklers arena, and considering the many flags around it, it made it quite useful for Polypa to gently swing her way across the rooftops to it, and then down.

The troll matched the photos. She was tall, perhaps nearly up to Polypa’s mid-thigh, her horns dramatically hooked at various angles; even the gashes in her horns looked hook-shaped. Her stance was haughty, her high ankles and foot-claws secured in spiked high heels that made her look even taller than she already was. Every bit as buxom and stout as her photo had suggested; the tight skirt and half-dress she wore clung to her body like a wrapper, and the whole image would have been nicely set off by long hair, rather than the short and prim bun she actually did have her quills pulled into.

Between the fishnets, her glasses, and the general air of cold disdain she projected, Polypa felt that she was giving an impression somewhere between ‘high class dominatrix’ and ‘librarian you do NOT want to cross’. Polypa withheld other judgments; she was a mercenary, not someone who made judgments. Still, she was getting very good at giving a feel off people, and she did not like the feeling she got off this troll.

And no one came her way if they didn’t deserve to be killed, in some way. Her callsign for this business was ‘Goezee’s Lightbulbs; I Make The Universe Brighter’. Nothing made things brighter like getting rid of people who made it worse.

Polypa waited, and mulled over a few plans to draw her out, and they all fizzled up as her target got up and swaggered towards the side of the building, out of sight of the main street on some errand, and most importantly from a tactical perspective, right below Polypa.

Her target didn’t look up, either, and it was a grave mistake for her.

Briefly praising the good luck of this morning, Polypa swung her gut off the gargoyle she had positioned it on, and the bit of statuary broke off in surrender to the inexorable pressure of Polypa’s body; it plummeted down, banging against the ground right next to the cerulean; she paused, her haughtiness freezing and her swinging stride halt. “What?” She said, looking for the noise. And above her, as the gargoyle piece had fallen, Polypa had taken advantage of it and crawled down the side of the building just like she had crawled up other walls early, her eyes glowing a faint green.

No one looking in from the street could see them, despite Polypa’s immense size. All the better.

The target picked up the gargoyle piece. “Who is littering around here?” She wondered aloud, not noticing a massive shadow falling over her until Polypa landed on her, belly first.

The noise was surprisingly soft, because Polypa held her gut back as much as possible, so it wouldn’t hit with all its force, but it was still enough to break nearly every bone in her target’s body, and the volume of it muffled her pained screams. Polypa didn’t say anything to her: not ‘shush’ or ‘be quiet’, or anything like that; she took it as a matter of professional dignity not to open up a dialogue with her targets. She had standards, after all.

Polypa’s belly wriggled, and the abs writhed, and clenched in ways that grabbed at her target’s body, slowly hauling her up with a few solitary whimpers. They kept her pinned firmly into Polypa’s belly, so that she couldn’t yell for help or otherwise alert anyone, and Polypa hissed at the marvelous bulge-pumping shiver of the curvy body being slid against her stomach, her muscles twitching and giving under her, molding to her and little fibrous bunches clutching her as tight as firm hands, and the yielding of her target’s own body. Her waist was wide against her, her rumble-spheres squished so nicely into her.

‘Focus’, she told herself as she did her best not to pant or anything. Stay on track. Do not get all… ravenous.

Her target was forced up into her rumble-spheres, and by now Polypa was able to grab her with her hands, forcing her upwards, making sure to squeeze her hard enough that she couldn’t breath enough to yell. And now Polypa was tugging her bandages off, just enough to reveal her mouth.

Her target’s face briefly curled into disgust at her scars, and Polypa was gratified to see her face sour into a horrified look as Polypa’s mouth widened. “No! You don’t dare-!”

Polypa’s massive lips met against her face, sucking on her so hard the breath was forced out of her air-sacs, and then her face slid right into her mouth, resting on her tongue. Several tickling feelings went on in Polypa’s jaws as several biological locks opened themselves; sinews and chitinous ‘pins’ kept her lower jaw together. A troll’s lower jaw was actually a pair of mandibles, normally locked together. But they could separate, to swallow particularly big meals.

Such as this cerulean, for instance.

Polypa’s lower jaw split, gaping wide and spreading wider than her face, her mandibles spreading out into her rumble-spheres, and a thick, green membrane connected them. The cerulean’s face was mashed into this, outlined against its surface, her rumble-spheres and shoulders mashing into the rubbery ring that was Polypa’s lips; without any real effort, Polypa pushed her in, her head, her rumble-spheres and her shoulders all easily sliding down her throat.

Polypa swallowed. Her throat muscles were as strong as the rest of her; more bones broke, and she felt her prey squirm in pained reflex as her chitin was pulverized nearly off her body, shards and fragments sliding down her moist insides. The lovely sensation of a solid, moving mass sliding down her mouth, moving down her meat-slide. Her prey’s thick body, her big belly, her huge butt; none of it posed a hindrance. It all slid down with a delicious ease, down into her guts.

The plural mattered. Polypa’s on-going mutation had multiplied her stomachs into a complex network to digest her food, treating them to a chemical process perhaps more similar to industrial refinement until they were a raw biological soup, or perhaps an organic grist, that her body simply absorbed and converted into energy and more muscles.

Her digestive fluids gushed in, drenching the cerulean still doing her best to wriggle inside Polypa; she said something, but Polypa’s belly was several feet thick, her abs even bulkier, and any sound was muffled. Polypa simply enjoyed the sensation, for a while, and lay there.

The first stage was simple enough; her pre-treatment fluids gushed in, drenching her prey and invading her body through her mouth, absorbed through her skin, plumping her up and softening her skin, bones and muscles.

Fifteen minutes passed in this manner. Polypa suspected she was pushing her luck, in her meeting with Tegiri and hanging around this neighborhood without getting noticed, and shakily stood up. It was harder to get up now, with an additional weight inside her, but it felt very good, her sliding around inside her-

Oh, she just slid down, into a secondary stomach. She must have been primed and, well. Juiced; Polypa suspected that anyone in that situation probably looked considerably puffier and slimy. She was still wriggling in there, though not very much.

As Polypa hurried out of the cold neighborhood, other fluids pumped into that belly, efficiently absorbed by the treated flesh of her target, who was pinned down, compressed by the stomach walls pressing down on her like a trash compactor. Polypa felt her wriggling slow down, and something in the texture of the troll in her guts shift. It wasn’t much of a change. It took days for her live prey to fully digest, and they were zoned out of their minds for most of it, and there wasn’t any particular change at this point, but Polypa supposed this stage of the digestion process started doing something to their body. Made it a bit more fluid, perhaps.

As Polypa went on her way, hurrying along and enjoying the bubbling sensations going on inside her, the cerulean calmed down completely. She felt a few solitary wriggles, possibly out of habit. Her belly muscles kept her pinned, but only because that was her default flex; the chemicals injected into her must have had a sedative quality, perhaps not too different from the sopor, because all her live prey went very quiet and peaceful extremely quickly.

Polypa called a buggy, and put her target out of her mind, apart from a few pleasured shivers at the way she slid down into another belly to be pumped full of digestive fluids on the gradual route into being reforged into bulk for Polypa’s muscles, thicker nectar glands, a bigger butt, perhaps a few more inches to her height, and incidentally making the universe better for her absence.

Alternian society did not have much of a problem with this sort of thing; Polypa upsetting the hemospectrum would have been the issue, and she didn’t much care anymore.

As her buggy arrived, Polypa mused that as so much of her bulk had come from assassinations she had carried out like this, her body was a testament to the number of people she’d removed from the world. She flexed a little bit, and catching a sight of her magnificent biceps, and a glimpse of the gigantic abs rising up even over her cleavage horizon, it was a warming thought.

Polypa sent a quick message to her commissioner. ‘Job’s done * will update you further in a few days.’

She received a fairly prompt reply, so ambiguously worded that they could have been talking about artwork or a coding commission. ‘That was speedy. Will update you for any further jobs. You how it is; always a little mmmmore to do.”

Polypa texted back. “Sure thing * always good to do your work * you’re reliable at these, you know that? *|’

Before she left, Polypa bent low, picking up the gargoyle statuary she had destroyed, and deposited it in the nearest salvaging bin. She might have been an assassin, but she wasn’t a litterer.

------------

Tegiri was a quiet troll, and had a way of fading away even when he was the only guy in the room. In a crowd, he became a background detail, lurking there, and drifting like a shadow.

Here and now, his shift from passively lurking to moving so abruptly he appeared to have materialized, was marked by an especially large buggy not so much rolling up, as sliding in, a bit like a cholera-bear that was opting to move without actually engaging it’s legs at all.

It rose up as its passenger departed. The long, heavy horns of Polypa appeared over the other side, and then rose up as she stood to her full size, stretching. People around froze up and turned to look at her bulbous form with awe, their eyes fixed on the shift of her platform-sized shoulders, and those closer to her were totally still, their eyes wide, completely overwhelmed by the sheer scale of Polypa unexpectedly appearing before them.

‘Weak’, Tegiri thought unsympathetically. If you couldn’t handle a little bit of majesty in your life, how were you supposed to serve the Condesce?

His secret shame was that he sincerely believed, in the rare moments where he could admit it to himself, was that he thought that Polypa looked far more impressive and mighty than the to-scale images and models he had seen of the Condesce.

A great heresy, to be sure, but he didn’t care about that anymore. It bothered him that he didn’t care, but as the days went on, it didn’t bother him as much.+

Polypa bowed again out of sight behind the buggy, to discuss something with the driver. At least, if you didn’t count her belly sticking out and rising above it, with her rumble-spheres buoyed atop it, and her backside very plainly visible from the other end, her tail curling around one leg and the tip wiggling anxiously. Tegiri couldn’t hear the fine details of what Polypa might have been saying, not over the soft murmurs from the crowd around both his side of the street and hers, but he had his suspicions; the buggy WAS a lot lower in the street, and any vehicle trying to carry her tremendous weight was bound to sacrifice itself in that noble goal.

The buggy tipped over briefly; Tegiri supposed that Polypa had thrust one muscular arm in it, with such force that the air moving from her hand alone had nearly knocked it over; if he knew Polypa, it was to over-pay the driver in apology for any damage transporting her had incurred. He made a point to suggest to the local consort-governance, running the city on behalf of the Heiress, to make a budget specifically for repairing damage caused by especially big trolls like her.

Then, she was moving across the street. Slowly, yes, actively trying not to put so much force as she could into it, but she still moved so fast that she seemed to have bounded straight from one side of the street to the next. He didn’t blinked, but it felt like he had, because now a vast shadow loomed over him, and it was Polypa, her body blotting out the moonlight, her squishy chitin shining an iridescent pink and green  He mostly just saw her stomach, her great work and the pride of her carefully sculpted body, and he felt a great surge of diamond-pale affection as she patted her belly, smiling faintly down at him. Long ago, their most ancient ancestors had gathered, and the small weak ones had gathered to the big, strong troll-women to protect them, and he supposed he felt something of that.

The oldest forms of the quadrants had been built from strong things. Love, certainly. Affection, reassurance. The need to stabilize others. Safe venues to voice the aggression and test oneself against a worthy lover. And for Tegiri, one of the strongest feelings was loyalty.

He saw a hand move from inside her stomach. Briefly, barely budging against a broad abdominal, and no one else could have seen it but him, his eyes adapted to note anything that might be wrong with Polypa.

Polypa’s express changed, just for a moment, and Tegiri knew what that had been. He knew the fear of disapproval.

Tegiri gazed up at Polypa, and followed up on a decision he had already made some time ago. He patted her stomach, almost stroking her belly, at the spot where her prey had moved. “You’ve been doing art commissions already?” He asked. “This early in the morning?”

Polypa stared blankly, until her one revealed eye blinked. Oh, right; the code they’d agreed to. “Yeah; figured I might as well do it as early as possible… thought I’d get it done before meeting up with you. I wasn’t trying to delay meeting up with you, or anything!”

“IT’s fine, it’s fine!” Tegiri said quickly. Polypa instantly calmed down, her raising chitinous plates lowering into something less agitated. “I just wondered… you didn’t have to use, ah.” He thought of a way to phrase it without giving her away. “Colder shades in your work, did you? That can be troublesome.”

She worked out what she meant, and like a mountain inclining, nodded her head gravely. “Yeah. You know i usually do.”

Yeah, I killed a highblood today. Again.

It was a bold thing, he knew, to just say that to a tealblood, one charged with enforcing the law, with killing mutants and accusing those they felt like bringing low. In sweeps not so long ago, when he had been younger, he would have enforced his imperial duty, without a second thought.

Now, though…

He patted her stomach again, and Polypa purred shortly, a dense rumble that spread out and made the windows rattle. “Well, you do what you must,” he said firmly. “I support you regardless, my moirail.”

Polypa grinned, leaning down (knocking a few people away with her on-rushing belly, and she was too focused on Tegiri to notice or care much) and raised a fist, extending two claws in a triangle shape.

He extended his own claws in a similar pose, and pressed them against digits nearly thick around as his entire arm, and completed the diamond. Then her hand moved downwards, to his sleeve, and took a gentle but inescapably firm grip, pulling him protectively close to her leg. “C’mon, let’s get our shopping in,” she said, smiling behind her bandages.

Tegiri was not much for open displays of emotion. He found big smiles a hard thing to maintain, a performative thing that he struggled with. Nevertheless, he smiled easily around her. Being around her made a lot of things easier.

Accepting things he’d never thought he could ever begin to even consider, for one.

Polypa led him onwards, and though there wasn’t really anything he could realistically do to stop her, she would if he asked, but he saw no reason to alter her course. He was loyal to her above all else now, even though the changes to his world view this demanded was upsetting at first, and would accommodate her however she wanted.

Even if it meant indulging her fondness for some anime series he absolutely detested, but when they left, carrying quite a lot of new model assembly kits from a recent series she’d absolutely fallen in love with, Tegiri felt fine with that.

It was all just part of the routine now, and he didn’t mind being adaptable.

[nom-the-skel]

[vore] Emotional Vampire

soft safe unwilling and willing vore

2.7k words

Sans clung half heartedly to Papyrus, telling himself he should just let go lest his brother get taken along with him, but not quite able to follow through. Papyrus held onto him too but didn’t dare use his full strength in light of Sans’s low HP. So it wasn’t too hard for their captor to pry them apart.

It was a skeleton monster, the same as them, but much bigger. Perhaps a bull or ram hybrid, he thought, based on its dark curving horns, but nothing about its scent confirmed that theory. Maybe it was a demon.

It picked Sans up by his ears, which hurt like hell, but the situation was already so bad that a little added pain didn’t make a difference. It lifted him free of the cage he’d shared with Papyrus and closed the door behind him.

“A bunny!”

Sans realized there was a second monster present that hadn’t registered through the fog of his panic and despair. It was smaller than the one that had him (although still huge), with the same kind of horns, dressed in light blue instead of orange, and apparently delighted to see him. Sans kicked feebly as the first monster held him out.

“Don’t struggle, now, bunny,” the taller skeleton chided. “If you’re cooperative, maybe I’ll let your friend go.”

“My brother,” Sans snapped, trying to twist around and glare at his captor, succeeding only in yanking painfully on his ears.

“Even better. No struggling, or your brother meets the same fate.”

Sans froze, hoping against hope that the monster was true to its word, and terrified to find out what fate it had in store for him.

“Poor bunny,” the blue-clad monster said, accepting Sans with gloved hands and mercifully alleviating the tension on his ears. “Don’t worry. I—”

“Blue,” the taller monster cautioned, cutting him off.

“All right, I know, I know. Can I at least pet him first?”

“Yeah, petting won’t hurt.”

Sans found himself cradled against Blue’s chest, pressed up against his sky-blue bandanna. The horned skeleton ran his fingers along Sans’s ears, but the gentle touch was unwelcome and not soothing at all. It only made Sans’s soul pound faster as he subtly turned his skull to see if he could catch sight of Papyrus.

Papyrus jolted as their eyes met, torn between—if not horror, at least deep concern about what was going on—and his default instinct toward a reassuring smile, resulting in a sort of rigid grimace, his ears stuck at half mast. In less dire circumstances it could have been funny in an endearing way. Sans couldn’t bear it and turned to look up at Blue instead.

He instantly regretted it. Blue’s jaw hung open, as if poised to engulf the bunny’s skull, the faint glow of his tongue lighting up the depths.

Sans was mesmerized for a second, but overcame it and pushed himself away, pressing against the creature’s glove. “What’re you doing?” he gasped.

It was the taller one that answered. “What does anyone do with bunnies like you? Don’t forget. No squirming.”

Sans went limp, defeated. Whatever they were going to do to him—and in front of Papyrus, no less—the only thing worse would be the same happening to his brother. “You wouldn’t,” he whimpered.

“Sorry, bunny, but you smell so good.” Blue licked him, soft tongue easily covering his skull and most of his ribs at once.

Sans must have blanked out for a moment, unable to process what was happening, but it didn’t spare him the shock of realizing he was pressed between Blue’s jaws, lying on the deceptively muscular tongue, the larger monster’s moan of pleasure reverberating around him as he was suddenly pushed farther in, the teeth scraping his fibulae. He couldn’t see much around him to begin with in the cramped space, and then nothing but blue magic as his skull was engulfed in the monster’s throat. He could do nothing but squeeze his eyes shut and tolerate the pressure moving down his body as he was swallowed.

***

“Is it good?” Stretch asked when his brother had finished.

“Mmm, yeah. He’s really sad,” Blue answered, glancing almost affectionately toward the skeleton bunny hidden in his stomach.

“I know what’ll make him even sadder.” Stretch grinned.

“Oh no,” Blue protested, but he couldn’t help but grin in anticipation as Stretch turned back to the cage and took out the second bunny.

“Look, he’s already crying.” Stretch handed it over.

“Of course he is, poor bunnies.”

Stretch could tell Blue wanted to say something to alleviate the little monster’s suffering, but that would defeat the point. He gave him a warning frown. “Hush, Blue. You can pet him, though.”

Petting was a good way to assuage Blue’s desire to soothe his victims, because in actuality it only tormented the bunnies further. Especially now that the second bunny was pressed up against the monster it had just seen swallow its brother. Stretch himself felt a twinge of guilt as the bunny rested a hand against Blue’s shirt, leaned against him as if to hug its brother through the ectoflesh.

“Go ahead, Blue. Let them be together.”

The bunny stiffened as Blue brought it into position, but didn’t seriously resist. It probably wanted to be with its brother too. Stretch watched as Blue gulped it down and slurped up its legs.

Stretch gave him a moment, then asked, “Well? How are they?”

“They’re both really sad.” Blue’s eyelights glowed bright. “Nggh, the first one’s really mad too!” He staggered, overwhelmed by the emotion, and Stretch helped him to sit down. “He’s so—mm—hopeless. Such delicious despair!”

“Good, good.” Stretch was pleased his brother was having a good feed.

***

“I’m so sorry, bunnies! I have to do it, you see, or I’ll starve.”

Papyrus blinked his eye sockets open, trying to remember where he was.

“My brother and I feed on emotions, you see. And mine is sadness. So I couldn’t tell you I wouldn’t hurt you, or you wouldn’t have felt so upset and I might not get much nourishment out of it.”

Papyrus felt a towel underneath him, and some slimy liquid cooling on his bones and fur. In front of him was a larger skeleton monster of some kind. After a moment he recognized him as the monster who had eaten—Sans! Where was Sans?

“Don’t worry, you’re not hurt, either of you!” the monster assured him as he caught sight of Sans on the towel next to him, lying still.

Ignoring him for the moment, Papyrus got to his knees and shook Sans gently. “Brother? Please wake up!”

“Five more minutes, bro, just this once,” Sans mumbled.

Papyrus laughed with relief. “Sans! Don’t you want to talk to—”

“Blue,” the monster supplied.

“Don’t you want to hear Blue’s explanation for his behavior? I’m sure he’s very sorry!”

“Yes,” Blue agreed sheepishly. “And if you want to yell at me, that’s okay. I deserve it.”

Papyrus thought about it for a moment as Sans finally sat up. “I for one am not going to yell at you. If you can’t feed on anything but sadness, you don’t have much choice, I suppose! But I’m worried about the, er, intensity of the experience for my brother. He’s capable of rather a lot of sadness.”

Blue looked hungrily at Sans, but his tone was apologetic. “Yes, he was a really excellent meal. It must have been hard on him, to be so sad.”

“What?” Sans scooted closer to Papyrus, watching Blue fearfully.

“Er, Sans? How much do you remember?” Papyrus put an arm around him.

“Enough,” Sans growled. “I remember you and—you! You said you’d let Papyrus go!”

Papyrus noticed the taller monster lounging on a couch some distance behind Blue, pretending not to hear Sans yelling at him.

“Don’t blame Stretch,” Blue pleaded. “It’s my fault, because I’m like this. He was only helping me.”

Papyrus laid his other hand across Sans’s chest, as if he might rush forward and attack the larger monsters at any moment and needed to be restrained. “Well, Blue, I can’t imagine you would have asked to feed on sadness. So there’s no need to blame anyone!”

“Yes there is.” Sans wasn’t straining to get at the larger monsters, but he was coiled and tense.

Papyrus ran his fingers down his brother’s ears. “Come now, Sans, nobody was hurt! And I’m sure they’re both very sorry about deliberately scaring you.”

Blue glanced doubtfully back at Stretch. “Oh, yes, of course! And, um, please let me help you clean up, and anything else I can do to make it up to you.”

“You could start by leaving us alone,” Sans hissed.

Papyrus wavered. He didn’t want to make Sans stay, but the offer of a bath was very tempting when they were both covered in blue slime.

“Sorry.” Blue bowed his head. He probably meant the gesture to be apologetic, but it gave the unfortunate impression of menacing them with his horns. “Are you sure you don’t want to stay? It wasn’t—really that bad, was it, aside from being scared?”

“I wasn’t—THAT scared.” Papyrus faltered, not wanting to discount Sans’s trauma, but unwilling to focus on the negative aspects of what had happened. “Of course, it was very scary, but—of course I knew Blue could be a good monster in the end! Which means he couldn’t really hurt us.” Blue could probably still do better by not scaring other monsters like that, but Papyrus hadn’t quite figured out how yet.

Sans looked up at him skeptically.

“Really?” Blue leaned forward over the table holding the bunnies and their towel. “Do you think you’d ever want to do it again?”

“Do what again?” Papyrus asked.

Blue grimaced. “You know—get, er, fed off of?”

“You mean let you feed off our emotions? I don’t know if—”

“Not me, my brother!”

“I don’t know if Sans is really—”

“Not him—you.”

“Me? But I’m not sure if I’d be terribly sad about it, now that I know it’s not dangerous.”

“Oh, no, no. Not sadness. I’m asking for my brother.”

The bunnies stared at him, confused. Even Sans let his ears perk up a little with curiosity.

“He feeds on happiness, you see. But it’s hard to find anyone who’s happy about being, um, swallowed alive.”

“Oh!” It all clicked, like solving a puzzle. “You and your brother feed on different emotions, and his is happiness. And the, er, donor has to actually be—inside him? I can see how that would be difficult.”

“Absolutely not.” Sans had an iron grip on Papyrus’s arm.

Papyrus’s ears dipped as he looked down at his brother. “Of course, Sans is quite understandably irritated with you both. But I do hate to turn down an opportunity to help a monster in need! I propose that we get washed up and then give it a little more thought.”

***

“I honestly can’t thank you enough, Sans!” Blue snatched the bunny up into a big hug, nuzzling and pressing their cheekbones together. Sans wasn’t thrilled, he could tell, by the way the bunny tensed and laid back his ears, but he’d have to get over his shyness if they were to go through with it.

“Yeah, well. I couldn’t let my bro come here by himself.”

Papyrus had been chatting with Stretch, who was still lazing on the couch even when they had guests, but he turned to look up at Blue. “You’ll be careful, won’t you, Blue? Are you sure you can’t, er, drain the sadness out, so he stops feeling it?”

“I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way.” Blue’s skull hung apologetically, bringing the curved tip of one horn within Sans’s reach.

“What are these for, anyway?”

Blue jumped as Sans grasped the end. “Don’t—Sorry, bunny, you startled me. But, ah, they’re kinda like antennae to detect whatever it is we feed on.” Sans’s fingers seemed to send a current through his bones; he was a bit disappointed when the bunny let go.

“Oh? So in your case, they react to sadness?” Papyrus hopped up to Blue’s shoulder and grabbed the tip of his other horn.

“Hey,” Blue protested, but this time he didn’t feel anything beyond the light touch of the bunny’s fingers. “Wow, I don’t feel anything at all from you. You’re not even a little sad?”

Papyrus’s ears dipped. “I am—concerned—about my brother participating in this. But that doesn’t mean I’m not happy to be able to help!”

“You didn’t have to bring him, you know,” Stretch said, finally sitting up.

“Yes, but he insisted on coming.”

“And we’re both very grateful,” said Blue, wishing Stretch would show it a bit more. “Especially my brother, because it really is hard to find anyone who’s happy about being swallowed, but I’m also glad to see you again, Sans, because even if you don’t have as much sadness as last time—I’d rather a smaller, more reliable meal.” He glanced away. “It means I don’t have to wring out all the sadness I can get. I don’t actually want you to suffer, you know.”

“Must be rough for you,” Sans replied dryly.

“Do you mind if we get on with it?” Stretch reached out toward Papyrus. “Like Blue said, I’m perpetually starving.”

“Of course!” Papyrus hopped into the larger skeleton’s waiting hands.

“Wait, wait!” Sans protested. “Could ya do me first? I don’t know if I wanna see this.”

Blue tilted his skull in consternation. What was Sans’s purpose in coming along if he didn’t want to watch and make sure his brother was eaten safely? “Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” Sans answered, and the absolute misery in his voice made Blue’s mouth water.

Blue held the bunny gently and pressed his tongue against his skull. Sans was trembling. Blue stopped, pulling away. “You don’t actually need to be afraid, you know. I don’t eat fear.”

“What, does it not agree with you?” Sans glared at him, skull glistening wetly.

“No, no, it’s just not the right emotion. Can I do anything to make you less scared?”

“Just hurry up and do it before I change my mind.” The bunny crossed his arms, which seemed to reduce the trembling.

“All right.” Blue raised the bunny to his mouth again, but paused. “Wait. Don’t you think you might be sadder if you watched your brother get eaten first?”

“What, am I not sad enough about this already?”

“No, that’s—” Blue tried to answer, but Sans interrupted him.

“I promise I’ll sulk and feel sorry for myself the whole time, so just get it over with.”

“Okay.” Blue gave him a nuzzle in apology and then stuffed the bunny into his mouth, ignoring the little gasp of surprise and gulping him down quickly.

Even knowing he would survive, Sans was deliciously miserable; in fact, it was a purer emotion without so much anger and betrayal as he’d felt the last time. Blue closed his eye sockets, appreciating the sudden influx; true, it wasn’t quite as intense as before, but having eaten recently he was more able to savor it.

When he came back to his senses, Stretch and Papyrus were both watching him.

“Are you sure Sans is okay?” the bunny asked, tension underlying his habitually cheerful tone.

“Oh, yes, of course. Do you want to see for yourself?”

“Er, I don’t—”

“You can see him from outside. Look.” Blue pulled his shirt up to reveal Sans curled up behind the translucent blue ectoflesh.

“Oh!” Papyrus hopped out of Stretch’s grasp and made a beeline for his brother, but Blue dropped the cloth barrier back into place.

“I’m sorry, it’s just that I think seeing you will make him happy,” he explained.

“Come on.” Stretch picked up the unresisting bunny. “It’s your turn now.”

Papyrus’s grin faltered at not being allowed to go to his brother, and Blue tried to think of something encouraging to say to him—Stretch needed him to be happy, after all, and Blue was ironically much better at making monsters happy!

But Papyrus quickly recovered on his own. “Of course! I’m happy to help!”

[creature-of-the-fright]

Just trust me, okay? (Reloaded)

Hey, it contains vore, don’t read this, if you don’t like it. And I can make some mistakes, ‘cause my native language is Russian, so I had to use Google translator. Enjoy reading! Have you ever thought about the meaning of life? Why do we exist and the like?The Retinazer, for example, saw its existence in mockery of others.Here and now …The branch under the boy’s foot crackled loudly. He ran through the thicket, trying to escape, and did not pay attention to the branches, tearing the skin in the blood. The child reeled out of the forest into a clearing, fell, stumbled, but then turned sharply back. The trees were shaken. The big red eye looked at the boy with hatred and anger.The little nightmare cried out and rushed to the river, rumbling nearby. From the forest a huge guy, 19 meters high, jumped out, with a long red hair on his left eye. And, it seems, he was clearly unfriendly. Vaughn, holding a blaster in his hand and aiming at the boy. And he, knowing that the shot can be stopped by water, has already jumped into the seething waves. Red-eyed, grinning, dropped his hand with his weapon. “I’m off again, you little bastard. Rejoice that this time you ran away. But do not wait for mercy in the next.” He turned and disappeared between the trees. Although, disappeared - too strongly said. At this size, do not particularly hide. The boy, long out of strength, but sailed far enough away, clutched his hands in the stone and struggled to the shore. “Ah … ah …” the water poured from his mouth. Swallowed, apparently.It was late autumn. The blue sky had long since hidden behind dark, heavy clouds that covered the sun. The rain broke first, and then the snow. The trees have already disposed of the variegated attire, which is now rotting in the ground.The child cringed and loudly coughed. Then he got up from the ground and wandered back to the taiga. He simply had no choice. Staying on an open surface will collapse with pneumonia or worse. Go into the forest - again the story with the chase could happen again. But, than to choose death from a frost, the little nightmare preferred to be either trampled, or roasted. For a long time he could not go. It was already an hour and a half dark and had to interrupt the transition. The boy looked up and looked at the thin crescent moon, indifferent to his fate. He sighed and sat down on a large stone, wrapped more closely in his black cloak. Long stay in the cold did its job, so the little nightmare curled into a ball and stared into the thicket. He wanted more quickly that all this was over. Though somehow, but it’s over. The child closed his eyes.Soon the boy felt that, for some reason, he was warmed up. He looked away a little and nearly yelled. Two huge eyes looked at him curiously. One, left, was bright green, and the other, right, was in an empty black eye socket with mechanical edges and glowed with a white pupil. It was from the breath and warmed little nightmare. The child, was ready to run, but it was raked by a huge hand. The boy screamed. But so far nothing terrible has happened. He just sat in the palm of his hand, blinking. He was showered with warm breath. “Uh, kid?” You’re cold?“ - heard a rather affectionate voice.The little nightmare did not hurry to answer, because this … mmm … stranger was, apparently, the twin of the one who was with the blaster. “Are you scared, huh? Hey, I will not hurt you, kid.” the green-eyed man continued to coo. “You’re as cold as ice … Listen, and I know how I can warm you.” The boy felt much warmer. And softer, by the way. And then suddenly falling and crowded.Green-eyed with difficulty swallowed his little “find” and sat down under a tree. By the way, he was slightly lower than his brother - only 17 meters.The nightmare suddenly realized what was happening and began to scratch and fight back, but it was too late. It is because of this that the guy hardly swallowed it. “Hey, hey !! …” The child was almost deaf from the loud voice that surrounded him. “Do not scratch! It hurts me!” The boy soon stopped kicking and again curled into a tight ball,squinting and sobbing. “Wow … Now … I frightened you? … Little one?… Hey, kid, it’s all right … Do you hear? I will not hurt you or harm you. Everything will be good. In the meantime … just calm down, okay?” The voice became somewhat guilty and apologetic. “Y … you’re lying … Why lie in the already doomed to … with death …? You gobbled me up!” Cried the little nightmare, fainting. And then completely gone.The child struggled to open his eyes, afraid of absolute darkness around. And then he remembered where he was, and even more panicked. Suddenly, awareness came. “It took several hours … and I … am I still alive …? Sort of like … but …” “ Hey? Are you awake? Hooray! I really thought you would not dare to regain consciousness, kid, “the gentle voice said again. "Who are you ?? … and why am I still alive? …” “Ah … I did not introduce myself … hehe, Oops. My name is Spazmatizm. And you’re alive, ‘cause I’m not alive” “ what???” “Ugh, damn it! Did not mean that. I’m the mechanism, here. Typically … a robot. You know, you’re the first one who did not run away from me, kid … What’s your name, m?” The little nightmare was silent for a while, and then whispered: “Me … My name is Nightmare … you can call me Night or Mare … and … I’d run away if I could !!..” The Spaz choked. “Would it really … have run away? … oh … how is it … so …” the green-eyed man stopped to talk. Night shuddered, realizing that he had said too much. “I … I’m sorry … please … thank you for not killing … and warming …” Mare timidly touched the “wall”. Spazmatizm with a sigh smiled and put his hand on his stomach. “Apology accepted, little one… I’m also sorry that I swallowed you without demand. Just understand that you would never allow me to do this. Right?” “Well … you’re right …” The little nightmare, a little bit bolder, immersed his hands in warm flesh. “Hehe. Tickling. Where are you from?” “Me? … This is a long story…” “Hah, you obviously have a lot of time to tell it and I - to listen to” green-eyed lay down on the ground and put his hands under his head. At the same time, the boy was slightly displaced in space. “Oh …! … Okay … In general, for a long time my parents were killed … and today 80 years have passed since that moment … I wanted to come to that place, but a man with a gun attacked me! .. he just like you looked … I had to run, it’s repeated every time …” the child quietly told. Spaz, listening to the story, shuddered. “Oh … Kid, I’m sorry … Really… If I knew that this is the case, I would not ask you … And about my twin brother: you’re right, he’s still a viper. I myself do not like to meet with him. Each time he directs his gun to the forehead and starts lecturing me to read that he will not let anyone in and out of the woods. Enrages,” - the green-eyed man gently pressed his fingers on the upper abdomen, trying to soothe the boy. Night, feeling stroking, grunted and pressed himself against the warm surface. “I see you do not get along very well with your brother … but what’s his name?” “Him? Oum … Retinazer.” “Why are your names associated with the eyes in one way or another?” “Ah … er … pfffff … I myself would like to know why our creator called us that way. And the surname is the top of genius. We are The Twins. It’s just so dumb sounds: Twin Retinaser and Twin Spazmatizm, that we seldom use the surname,” - Spaz yawned loudly, clicking his sharp teeth. “The creator … you’re a mechanism, but you’re emotionally … and even more human than your brother …” murmured Night, tapping his fingers lightly on the flesh. “And I hear you’re tired … it’s all so weird, huh?” “Pfff … hahaha !! Forgive, ticklish. Well, I feel a lot, it’s true. And how - this is another question. Wahah … do you mind if I take a nap for an hour or two?” “Wahah …” Mare yawned, too. - “Do not mind … of course not against…"Spazmatizm turned to his side and looked up at the sky:"Good night, little Night. I’m glad that at least you trust me…” The green-eyed voice died down. Breathing also became much quieter and deeper. But he, apparently, tried not to snort and snore, so as not to interfere with the new little friend.Well, the boy also fell asleep. He did not lose consciousness, but simply fell into the kingdom of Morpheus.

[spacefrug-archive]

tagged by @sugar--trash

Rule 1: Tag 9 people you would like to know.

no

Rule 2: Bold the statements that are true.

APPEARANCE

I am 5’ 7" or taller

I wear glasses

I have at least one tattoo (Getting another soon as a christmas gift/birthday gift to myself)

I have at least one piercing (had, allergic reaction though, they all fell out)

I have blonde hair

I have brown eyes

I have short hair

My abs are at least somewhat defined

I have or have had braces

PERSONALITY

I love meeting new people

People tell me that I’m funny

Helping others with their problems is a big priority for me 

I enjoy physical challenges (even when I seem like I dont want to fucking do it, I enjoy it when I end up doing it)

I enjoy mental challenges

I’m playfully rude with people I know well (Drew is a minion toesies licker)

I started saying something ironically and now I can’t stop saying it (Vore, tummy, pisspiss)

There is something I would change about my personality

ABILITY

I can sing well

I can play an instrument (learning?)

I can do over 30 pushups without stopping

I’m a fast runner

I can draw well

I have a good memory

I’m good at doing math in my head

I can hold my breath underwater for over a minute

I have beaten at least 2 people in arm

I know how to cook at least 3 meals from scratch

I know how to throw a proper punch (Have broken at least two noses in my life time, maybe more I forget)

HOBBIES

I enjoy playing sports (Like half an half? it has to be sports I enjoy like swimming, dog agility, horse riding)

I enjoy arts

I’m on a sports team at my school or somewhere else

I’m in an orchestra or choir at my school or somewhere else  

I have learned a new song in the past week

I work out at least once a week

I have drawn something in the past month

I enjoy writing

I do or have done martial arts

EXPERIENCES

I have had my first kiss

I have had alcohol (I love cider and rum)

I have scored the winning goal in a sports game

I have watched an entire season of a TV show in one sitting

I have been at an overnight event

I have been in a taxi

I have been in the hospital or ER in the past year

I have beaten a video game in one day

I have visited another country

I have been to one of my favorite band’s concerts

RELATIONSHIPS

I’m in a relationship

I have a crush on a celebrity

I have a crush on someone

I have never been in a relationship

I have asked someone out or admitted my feelings to them

I get crushes easily

I have had a crush on someone for over a year

I have been in a relationship for at least a year

I have had feelings for a friend

MY LIFE

I have at least one person I consider a best friend

I live close to my school (don’t go)

I have at least one sibling (2 sisters, don’t get on with one tho)

I live in the United States

There is snow right now where I live

I have hung out with a friend in the past month

I have a smartphone

I have at least 15 CDs

I share my room with someone

RANDOM SHIT

I have breakdanced

I know a person named Jamie

I have had a teacher with a last name (my last name isn’t a common one lmfao it’s German I think?)

I have dyed my hair (At least a dozen times, I’m thinking of doing it again before I move)

I’m listening to one song on repeat right now

I have punched someone in the past week

I know someone who has gone to jail

I have broken a bone

I have eaten a waffle today

I know what I want to do with my life (I’m almost 23 and I still don’t know what I want to do, don’t rush things)

I speak at least 2 languages

I have made a new friend in the past year

[shiftytracts]

Stop Wanting More, part 2 of 2 (T/M/A fic)

In which season-four Jon tries to quiet his hunger for live statements by gorging himself on paper ones, and Daisy tells him what she used to do when she got shaky between hunts. Part one here.

Content warnings for this half:

Nausea, and brief descriptions of prior vomiting

Vague discussion of Daisy’s passive suicidality

Animal cruelty and death: Daisy talks about hunting rats for sport

—

“Statement of Alice ‘Daisy’ Tonner, regarding—”

“Shhhh! You’ll wake the tape recorder.” Her hand clapped over his mouth so hard his teeth buzzed like mugs in a cupboard. He did his best to say Ouch. The salt on her palm made his inner lips itch. Daisy sighed: “Too late; I can hear it hissing.”

At once the cushions began to lurch again, and his stomach contents with them. On her way past him off the couch Daisy managed both to step on his trouser leg and elbow him in the sacrum. Chills curled up in the shadows of heat she’d left on his forehead, stomach, legs. Her way back into her prior position went smoother, though. She even remembered how tightly to press his belly with hers. Why did returned warmth always make him shiver?

“Alright—skip the spiel. Just Ask.”

“What did you used to do when—” Daisy cut him off with a hollow laugh, which Jon seconded. As soon as he’d begun to speak the tape recorder clicked back on, as he’d suspected it would.

“Whatever; just do it.”

“You won’t be too self-conscious?”

She shrugged. “Won’t matter; I’ll be compelled.”

Jon bit down the wave of remorse and resentment her words stirred inside him. She’d agreed to this—cajoled him into it, even. He could examine those feelings later, when she’d gone to bed. When he was alone, and warm, and.

Unbidden into his head came the passage from Tristram Shandy about the “beds of justice.” He’d never read it before, having got through hardly ten pages of that book, and wondered now for half a second how Beholding could have thought this would help, until there thundered across his mind the words, I write one half full,—and t’other fasting;—or write it all full,—and correct it fasting;—or write it fasting; and Jon swallowed, as if that would make it stop. Less than a second later he could feel his stomach trying to expand around it.

Last week he’d tried reading an encyclopedia—vore-ing it, cover to cover. No good; he quit a third of the way in, when it bored him so much he caught himself fantasizing about its giving him a paper cut he’d have to get up to attend to. Eating fear-free trivia was like trying to fill up on tic tacs. Only when stuffed could he even feel it going down.

He told himself if he didn’t Ask her for her story now he’d only spoil his dinner with more useless facts.

“What did you used to do when you got shaky between hunts?”

“I hunted rats around my flat,” Daisy said at once, in the expressionless way of compulsion. In a voice more like her own, she went on, “Not inside, not at first, just—around the dumpsters. First my building’s, and then some nights the whole block. However long it took before I got too slow to enjoy chasing.

“Then one night I thought I saw one dart past in the corridor. So I left out bait for it, half hoping it’d attract more rats into the building. It worked; I found three in there that week.”

“What do you mean bait?”

Again her first sentence emerged as though she were reading it off a list. “Leftovers, mostly. Wasn’t hard—I didn’t have much appetite for” (in one-handed air quotes, with a huff of laughter) “'people food,’ anyway. I’d just make sure to leave a few bites unfinished, and stick them under the mat at the top of the stairs. Sandwich crusts usually, nothing gross. When I got Chinese takeaway I’d use the cabbage they put in the box.”

To make air quotes Daisy’d had to fish her hand out from under the blanket. Now she returned it to its slot on the side of his gut where hip gave way to bloat. Jon almost wished she hadn’t; he feared the reminder might weigh him down. He felt giddy and light, like if he stood and walked, hell, ran, it might not hurt his legs and chest. Like if he flapped his hands instead of wringing them he’d bump the ceiling. For Daisy to comfort his body he’d have to remember he had one.

“How did you catch them? It does—uh.” Whichever Watcher department took charge of compulsion seemed to know his question ended here, because Daisy responded before Jon could finish his follow-up sentence. (It doesn’t sound like you laid traps, he’d meant to say.)

“By the tail. I ran after them and stepped on their tails and then.” She paused for an entire second and closed her eyes tight, but by the time Jon realized what this meant she’d already concluded: “I snapped their spines with my shoe.”

That was all she said, but not all he learnt about it. The Eye let him—made him hear the crunch. For an instant it shared with him the satisfaction Daisy’d felt at the finality of that sound. It had been a sore spot for her, a then-recent wound, how many monsters didn’t die when you broke their necks.

Then her satisfaction left him, and he felt intensely sick.

“Stop—don’t say any more—I’m sorry Daisy, I didn’t—”

She snarled a sigh. “Yeah, I know. Guess I should’ve told you not to ask about that part.”

“Oh. No, it’s. I'm alright, I just meant, it looked like you… didn’t want to tell me that.”

“No I didn’t,” Daisy concurred, in a tone so flat he wondered whether he’d somehow compelled it.

“Is there anything else you don’t—er. What other questions about this would you prefer I didn’t ask.”

She shrugged. “Everything else is fair game.”

“Okay,” Jon said, wishing that answer reassured him more. “You don’t—need a minute, or?”

Again she shrugged. “Yeah, alright. You look like you might, anyway. How’s your gut feeling.”

It took him a moment to realize she meant his actual gut, not like. When he did he answered without thinking: “Not bad? Ignorable, mostly, but. That in itself is.” He looked down at his fingertips for some loose skin to peel. “I’m… stronger, now, already, my. My limbs feel like.”

Daisy nodded. “Like they could carry you without having to think about it.”

“Quite,” Jon agreed, though he wished as soon as the word left his mouth that he’d picked a different one. Something that sounded less like he wanted to talk about the phenomenon’s downside, its sinister implications. He very much did not.

“The rats, did you… eat them?”

“Ew, Jon,” she replied, like it was obvious. “Not literally, no. Didn’t have to. You don’t literally eat statements either, yeah? I just killed them and it… fed me.”

“But didn’t satisfy you,” Jon suggested.

“No. They didn’t make me less hungry, just made it easier to sleep. And they made my belly swell up like yours.” (She patted his; he huffed in pretended offense.) “That’s why I only did it after I’d gone home for the night: it made me slow. I’d know I’d had enough to go to bed when I couldn’t run after them anymore. When I tried to go without—I couldn’t keep my eyes closed. Soon as I stopped thinking about it, they’d fly open. Or at least, it never felt like I slept. Guess I must’ve done, though, ‘cause sometimes I’d find myself chewing on the bedding.” Daisy shook her head, with a sigh interpretable also as a laugh. “Think I’ve started doing that again. I keep finding holes in Basira’s sleeping bag.”

“Not yours, though?” Jon knew she and Basira slept with the edges of their two sleeping bags zipped together. (A frankenbag, Daisy called it.)

Daisy grinned: “No. Hers is a better texture.”

“Thought you said you didn’t remember doing it.”

“I don’t, but mine looks like it’d be grosser to have in your mouth.”

In reality, Jon had never seen her sleeping bag up close, but now Beholding showed him what it looked like. Once kelly green but now faded grayish, like a pond; the fabric was all over pills. It smelled like wood smoke, Ritz crackers, and the lone sock one finds at the bottom of every suitcase.

“That’s fair,” Jon allowed, hoping the strain in his voice would sound to her like a laugh. Somehow this piece of information, about the godforsaken sleeping bag, had brought his stomachache back way above the “ignorable” waterline. The nauseating smell, maybe? He tried to steady himself with a deep breath, but, well.

“You look sick.”

“Was it that obvious?”

“You’re not subtle, Jon,” she scoffed; “you gasp and writhe.”

Jon tried to shrug, tried to laugh. “I’m fine. It’s just… a lot. I’m alright, I’ve just never.” What, been this full? Compelled an eldritch snack after having already eaten his weight in paper? As if that weren’t obvious. He drew in breath to speak, but still hadn’t thought of an end to his sentence. Then he felt Daisy’s hands—both of them—start to dig shallow trenches, one up each of his sick sides. His breath came out in a shaky sigh.

“That help?”

“Yeah.”

Each time they reached his ribs—or, in the left side’s case, the place where his ninth and tenth ribs used to be—her hands turned back, in a slight arc so that they made narrow ovals, each a little closer to his stomach’s center than the last. Until they met in the middle, then worked their way slowly back out to his sides.

“Could you… keep doing that while I hear the rest of your.”

Her laugh had an edge to it that miiiight have been contempt? But she said, “Sure. What do you still want to know?”

“Uh.” He pretended to have to think about it. “Why don’t you hunt rats now?”

“I don’t want to kill things just because they’re weaker than me.” Daisy’s hands had frozen in place while she spoke these words; now they resumed. She sighed, but Jon wasn’t sure at what. “Rats are fine, they don’t need to die.”

“I wouldn’t say they’re fine,” Jon scoffed; “pretty sure they serve the Corruption. They spread hantavirus, ratbite fever, lymphocytic”—he paused to swallow a wave of nausea, hoping it was the ugliness of these facts and not their sheer bulk that sickened him. He hoped also that she’d assume his voice had caught on the pronunciation, rather than. He cleared his throat and continued: “Lymphocytic choriomeningitis, and leptospirosis. And the plague, of course, though not without help from.”

Daisy groaned, her teeth bared to the canines. Jon could feel her fingers curl into fists, though thankfully none of his skin got trapped between her nails and palms. “That’s exactly the kind of judgment I’m trying not to make anymore. They’re—they’re also good, okay? Rats. Had a friend with a rat once, when I was a kid.” For an instant Jon wondered if she meant Calvin Benchley. Then the Eye told him she did. “You can teach them tricks. Like dogs. His knew how to fetch, roll over, go through mazes to find treats. And they’re affectionate, friendly. The tails are weird, but—they have sweet eyes.”

A huff of laughter tumbled out of Jon’s nose. “All animals have sweet eyes. That’s a pretty low bar.”

“Don't flatter yourself.”

The Ceaseless Watcher seemed to side with her on this, showing him the eyes of lemurs, flies, goats, anglerfish (the regular kind).

“Either way, I hardly think that outweighs the plague.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Daisy insisted, still sounding querulous. She’d retracted her hands now, and held them balled together close to her chest—like Jon himself did when he felt too shy to stim outright. If they hadn’t been talking about rats the attitude probably wouldn’t’ve struck him as rat-like, but.

“It doesn’t always need to matter which one of those things is more important,” she went on. “It feels like it does, but—sometimes that’s just a habit we get into. Some things just are, okay? I like not having to think about it anymore.”

“Right, that makes sense, we can….”

“Besides. I didn’t care about any of that when I was hunting them. The diseases or whether they’re part of the Filth or whatever. I just knew they were gross, and that people were scared of them. That’s the main reason I killed monsters, too.”

“What if you just… caught them and let them go?”

“Monsters?”

“No, rats.”

“I don’t want a substitute, Jon. I’m alright going cold turkey.”

“But it’s not cold turkey, it’s—no turkey.”

Daisy looked at him for the first time in what felt like a while, and smiled, but furrowed her eyebrows. “Just what do you think ‘cold turkey’ means?”

“I know there’s no actual turkey,” Jon sighed, trying to ignore the Eye’s barrage of suggestions for where the phrase might have originated. God, his stomach hurt. He missed having her hands there to rub away some of this nausea and ache. Wondered what he could say to bring them back. Doing it himself at a time like this would’ve felt so. “I just mean, withdrawal is—different. It can kill you, but you’re still abstaining from something that people in general don’t need to live.”

“Aaaand you think people in general need the Hunt.”

“Of course not. I know you know what I’m getting at,” Jon persisted. “You’re talking about starvation—which, unless for some reason the Fears are too sentimental to throw their old husks away, means it will kill you. Not just—‘can.’”

“Maybe. Probably, yeah. If some monster doesn’t come around to kick me off the wagon first. I’ve told you that before, though.”

“…Okay. Yes, you have, that’s. Yes. So then—?”

“What?”

“Why are you giving me a statement!?”

“To commiserate,” Daisy recited first, in the flat tone of compulsion—and then, “Shhh!”

“Tape recorder’s already on.”

“Yeah but Basira’s out there; she might—be asleep. It’s not a statement,” said Daisy. “Just a story.”

As usual Jon let himself fall into the trap. Was it a statement? By Institute standards, maybe not; he wasn’t sure it counted as a supernatural encounter, except from the rats’ perspective. And most of the fear in it was the rats’, too. He supposed you could call it an encounter with her own changing nature? Statement of Alice ‘Daisy’ Tonner, regarding her supernatural hunger and how she.

“But why would you feed me a story when the answer you come to at the end of it is that it’s better to starve?”

This time he didn’t mean to compel her—was sure he’d phrased it indirectly enough not to. But Jon was surer yet Daisy wouldn’t have given the answer she did except under compulsion:

“Because I felt sorry for you.” Then she winced, bared her teeth, shook her head; Jon wondered if she’d felt that one. It seemed like people usually didn’t—just heard themselves speak words they hadn’t meant to, and surmised what had happened from that. But maybe after so many in a row she’d begun to feel the static.

“For what? Why?”

“For feeling evil. Because it reminded me of me.” In her own voice: “Think maybe I wanted it off my chest, too.”

So, what? The moral high ground was alright for her, but he was too weak for it? Or, or not, what, spiritually advanced enough to walk that plane? Because he hadn’t been conscious for his six-month limbo between life and death, like she’d been in the coffin?

“But you resist, so—? Why wouldn’t you think I should starve too?” On the ocean floor of his stomach something evil emerged from its hole. “Hhh—wait, don’t answer that, I’m—”

Too late. “Because eating the statements doesn’t hurt anything. The ones already written down—just recording them, it’s harmless. And you can’t give me bad dreams anymore, so—ugh.” Jon opened his eyes to find Daisy clawing at her temples. She shook her head, to the extent she could without knocking into his. “I told you I'm trying not to do that anymore.”

I’m not ready, Jon had meant to say. But seeing how little she liked having answered, he wished he could claim it was for her sake he’d tried to stop her.

He still wasn’t ready to hear or think or talk about this, really. The top half of his belly seared with such pain he couldn’t think straight; lower down it squirmed. He felt perilously sick. His whole body wanted so badly to curl into a ball that his legs wouldn’t quit twitching against Daisy’s. He pressed his elbows into his sides, while his hands hovered, pathetically he was sure, just over the top and center of a stomach he feared would pounce if he dared touch it.

But he felt like owed her some proof he’d been listening. “Do…?”

“Judge people. Decide what’s right for them.”

“I see,” Jon lied; that was all he could manage for now. In truth he needed a break before he could even parse what she had said.

“Turns out I can’t lie to myself under compulsion either. I didn’t think that was the reason?—thought I was just not judging you.”

“I think”—he pushed himself back from her, sure for a second that he was about to be sick. It passed, but his breath caught on it as on panic, so he couldn’t pretend it hadn’t happened.

Especially not since Daisy too shot upright, her nails loudly scraping the cushion behind her as she hurled herself against it. “Shit—turn around—not on the couch—”

“I’m okay, it’s.” He did turn around, just to ease her mind, but the motion required had quite the opposite effect on him. Jon heard the sounds of ragged breath and whimpering, then recognized his own voice behind them.

Daisy’s hands came to perch one on the back of his shoulder, the other on his side between rib and pelvis. “Don’t worry about it, just get it out. We’ll clean it up later—just like last time, remember?” The fingertips of the hand on his side twitched back and forth at his stomach’s very outer edge.

“N—o, I.” He swallowed. “I think I’m alright.” Tried opening his eyes. Nope, not ready. His breath shuddered again. Daisy’s hands vanished from his shoulder and side; he heard the flapping sound of a blanket being shaken out, then felt it flutter and settle on top of him. Must’ve got dislodged when he rolled over, though he was warm enough now he hadn’t noticed. Dimly he recognized this as a victory.

Her hand moved to stroke his back; she kept saying Shhh, but not in the harsh way she had earlier. “You, uh.” Again Jon swallowed, though what ailed him was a lack of spit rather than excess of it. “You weren’t nearly this nice last time.”

“What?” The hand on his back stilled. “I was too! I tied your hair back for you! I let you ruin my jumper by wiping your pukey mouth on it! I sat with you, on the cold hard floor, in front of the toilet, and let you babble all your egghead theories to me about vomit and the Corruption, even though I’d been sick not two days before, and could barely stand the smell even without you philosophizing about it—”

“No, I meant—the time before, when you. Never mind.”

“Oh—when I had to clean it up?” Jon nodded, hoping she’d be able to tell that from the back of his head. “Yeah, well. Guess I like you better now.”

“Can’t imagine why.”

“Me neither.” And yet she scooted closer to him, hooking her chin over his shoulder. Her hand came to rest on his belly again, its heel in the hollow at the edge of his pelvis. “This okay? You alright with touch right now?”

In response Jon felt around for her hand. When he found it he slotted his fingers between hers, pulled her hand to a sicker-feeling place a few inches higher up, and left his there on top of it.

“Right,” Daisy laughed—“my mistake.” She dragged their combined hands very gently back and forth across the place he’d brought them to. “This where you’re feeling yuckiest?”

His breath caught again, but with surprise and relief this time. With his free hand Jon covered his eyes, willing himself not to think about how ridiculous he must seem to her right now. “That’s, er. That’s perfect, yes.”

“Sure.”

“Though actually—do you think—maybe a slightly… longer stroke?”

Again she laughed. Her hand went limp under his. “Backseat driver. Alright, show me how it’s done.”

It took him a minute to determine that himself. He tried pulling her hand back and forth past his navel, but that grated against something sharp inside. Supposed he couldn’t consult the Oracle for this. Up and down, maybe? Yes, that would do. Or a circle perhaps. Anti-clock—? No, clockwise, definitely. Much better.

Once they’d got that sorted out, Jon said, “I wonder if… you’d let me Ask. One more question.”

“Seriously? I can feel how stuffed you are; how could you possibly want more? Five minutes ago you nearly puked.”

“I’m just—curious, alright? I won’t be sick, I promise.”

“Fine.”

“Did you ever… throw them up?”

“I didn’t eat them, Jon. Told you that already.”

“Alright, poor choice of words. Did you ever—” he tried to think how best to phrase it. “When you threw up regular… people food. Did something of the rats ever come up with it?”

“Yeah. I only got sick once in the time I was doing it, but, I think so, yeah. Thought I was just really out of it at the time though. They didn’t make me sick, I don’t think—just another stomach bug, like the one I gave you. One of those bugs where everything has to come out? And it came on me in the middle of the night, so the last thing I’d”—a pause to sigh; her hand slipped out of his, presumably to make air quotes, but then took it again before he could think of somewhere else to put it—“‘eaten’ was the rats. Not as many as usual; I was already feeling slow that evening. But, yeah. They… it wasn’t their actual bodies, though, okay? I thought I was just dry heaving at first—you know when you’re hanging over the toilet bowl because you know you’re gonna be sick—”

Jon squirmed, fighting a temptation to cover his ears. “Yes, thank you, I’m familiar with—”

“—but you can’t get anything solid up yet, you just retch and drool and cough into the bowl. Well it started then, and then, some of it got mixed up with my sandwich. It was like I… felt their fear, like I—became them, for a second. Each one of them.”

She’d been right; it was too much. God, please don’t make him be the rat! Jon bit his lip ducked his head to his chest curled his toes bent his knees, anything, trying to barricade the doors against the onslaught of information. He pressed his and Daisy’s combined hands hard into the place where his stomach jutted forth from ribs for fear if he didn’t try to equalize the pressure inside from without he might burst like a sheep in clover and flood this whole room in half-ruminated text, a cloud of serifed letters scuttling heinously all over himself and Daisy like half-formed spiders.

“I don’t know how I knew that’s what it was,” Daisy went on. “It wasn’t like I saw the scene again, or heard the crunch, or felt the. Anything like that. I just—was the rat. I was prey. Just for a second. And knew that I—me, as in.” Again her hand slipped out of his. “The Hunter, was about to kill me. And… then it faded and I was me again until the next one.”

Her hand returned to the dome at the top of his gut where he’d last set it, but its ghosts on his palm and between his fingers remained cold. She brushed the hand up and down his belly, airily—oblivious to how its muscles clenched and undulated. Jon panted and forced himself to focus on her hand and nothing else. How it bumped and shuddered when his stomach’s shape morphed under it. How at the end of his every exhale her touch became so light it tickled. This was the present Daisy, and the present Jon. Here on this couch in the Institute basement. Both thin, her bony ilium pressed closer to his sacroiliac joint than was quite comfortable. Warm, except up one leg where the blanket let in a draft.

The one who’d tried to prey on him was long gone. If anything he was the one feeding on her, now. And they just laid on the couch together, massaging her horrors into more comfortable shapes inside him.

“That enough?”

Jon grunted an incredulous huff. “Too much,” he admitted, unable to keep the strain out of his voice. “You were right—I, uh. Didn’t know stomachaches came this size.”

Her laugh sounded affectionate. The lines up and down his stomach morphed into circles around it. “Ha—look how much higher your belly comes up on this side. That must be where your ribs were.”

“Yes, I’ve. Noticed that before, thanks.”

“Think you’ll keep it all down?”

“Hope so.”

“Good luck. Wouldn’t want you to have to relive the rats again.”

Oh, god.

“The less said about it the—better I’ll feel, I think.”

“Well that’s a change,” Daisy mused, patting his stomach as though in summation. “I should get to bed. Be alright on your own?”

“Er.” No, no, no, god please no, not alone yet with all these? “Yes, alright. I should be fine.”

She laughed again. “I’ll stay til you fall asleep.”

--

(For Daisy’s take on “the time before,” when she had to clean up his vomit, see Abyss of Possibilities; to view the drawing in less-bad resolution, see this post)

[nom-the-skel]

[vore] First Hunt

Digitigrade anthro fox Papyrus and kemonomimi skeleton Bluebunny

Safe vore, 1.5k words [on AO3]

Naturally, the bunny didn’t even hear Papyrus approaching. It wasn’t a regular bunny monster but some kind of skeleton hybrid. He hoped it might not be as cute as other bunnies, but when he caught a glimpse of its face his ears tilted back in dismay. It was adorable, and the little bandanna tied around its neck didn’t help at all. He steeled himself, holding perfectly still so the bunny wouldn’t notice him. He had to do this, or Sans would never stop worrying about him. The bunny had its back to him again, and he was easily in pouncing range. There was no reason to delay any longer. He leaped and landed with his front paws pinning the bunny to the ground on its front. It was almost anticlimactic. The bunny scrabbled at the grass, trying to pull itself out from Papyrus’s grasp. He resisted the urge to lean back and take his weight off it. It was so small and delicate, but surprisingly strong. Giving up for the moment, the bunny looked up at him over its shoulder. He looked back at it awkwardly. “Uh, hello!” It was only polite to greet it. He belatedly added the friendliest smile he could manage, but perhaps it showed off his teeth a little too much, as it made the bunny flinch sharply. He wasn’t sure what to do next, so he just looked at the bunny until it calmed down enough to answer him. “Er. Hello,” it said, then paused. Papyrus still hadn’t figured out how to proceed when it continued. “Do you think you could—that is, you don’t have to hold me down so tight, do you?” “I’m afraid if I reduce the pressure you’ll escape,” Papyrus explained, folding his ears in apology. “All right, I won’t escape. Just stop leaning on me so I can change position.” “All right,” Papyrus agreed. He wouldn’t be terribly upset anyway, if the bunny broke its word and ran off. The bunny twisted around, and then it was lying on its back looking up at him with his paws gently resting on its chest. “Thanks,” it said, breaking the awkward silence. “You’re welcome,” Papyrus answered automatically, and the awkward silence resumed. “So—what are you gonna do with me?” the bunny asked eventually, its ears tilted nervously. “I’m—I’m afraid I’m going to have to eat you.” He felt the bunny flinch at his words. It was still smiling up at him, but he suspected that was just how its skull was shaped. “Oh. Well. I suppose that’s understandable,” it said. “You are a fox, after all.” Papyrus leaned back on his haunches, lifting his paws off the bunny. “I can’t do this.” “Huh? Why not?” The bunny sat up but made no move to escape. Papyrus looked away, pretending he needed to adjust his scarf. When he looked back the bunny was still there. “Go on, bunny. Run away!” he urged. “But I told you I wouldn’t!” “But if you don’t run, I’m going to have to eat you!” The bunny shrugged. “You did catch me! It’s only fair, I guess.” Papyrus whined at it. “You—don’t want to?” the bunny asked, and for a moment Papyrus thought it finally understood. “Am I—unappetizing?” it asked, looking down at itself. “No, of course not! You smell very tasty,” Papyrus rushed to assure it, since it seemed a little insulted. And he had been salivating at its scent ever since he began stalking it. “Then why wouldn’t you eat me?” the bunny asked, brightly. “You—don’t mind?” The bunny laughed. “Well, that hardly matters to most foxes! You’re a very nice fox, aren’t you?” Papyrus couldn’t help but preen a little at the compliment. “And you’re a very honest bunny. I would understand if you took this opportunity to escape, you know.” The bunny grinned. “Don’t be silly. I wouldn’t break a promise!” Papyrus stepped closer to it, then scooped it up in both forepaws. He’d set out to catch and eat a bunny, so he ought to be glad he was going to achieve his goal, and the bunny didn’t even seem upset about it; although it did look a little nervous now that he’d lifted it off the ground. “All right, then. It was a pleasure to meet you, bunny. Goodbye.” “It was nice meeting you too! Even if it means getting eaten.” The bunny sounded a little giddy and he could feel it shivering. He tried to be gentle as he inserted it between his jaws. It tasted like bones and rabbit, and cloth, as it was wearing rather a lot of clothing. Papyrus had fur and found clothing to be redundant, except for his fashionable and heroic scarf, but the bunny had hidden most of its bones with a shirt, pants, gloves, and boots, in additional to its stylish bandanna. Fortunately the material had absorbed some of its rabbitiness, so it wasn’t as unpleasant as he might have expected. He pushed the bunny deeper and swallowed it skull-first. It didn’t resist, but it was still rather large. He could feel its progress into his stomach, and the way it squirmed around even after it arrived. He sat where he was and waited for it to stop, trying not to imagine what was happening to the accommodating little bunny now. *** “Sans! I did it!” Papyrus announced when he arrived back at their house. “Did what, bro?” “I caught a rabbit!” “Oh, really? That’s awesome. Me too, actually.” Sans pulled something out of the pocket of his hoodie and held it up by the ears. It was another skeleton rabbit, a little bigger than Papyrus’s, dressed in orange. “Oh! Another skeleton! Just like my bunny.” “Yeah? Where is it?” “I—ate him already.” “Oh? Wow.” Sans didn’t show any sign of doubt. “I guess you won’t be hungry for this one then.” “Wait,” said the orange bunny. “A skeleton rabbit? Like me? Did he have a blue bandanna?” Papyrus nodded, dreading the bunny’s reaction. “That sounds like—my brother. Did he say his name was Blueberry?” “I didn’t ask,” Papyrus admitted. But there weren’t that many skeleton bunnies running around in blue bandannas. “Your brother, huh?” Sans was infuriatingly casual. “Maybe you’d rather join him, if you’re gonna get eaten either way?” The bunny just dangled there, staring at Papyrus. “Sans, I can’t—” “Sure you can. First time’s the hardest, right?” Sans pushed the bunny at Papyrus, who accepted it rather than letting it fall. “And he wants to be together with his bro, don’t you, bunny? I would. Assuming I couldn’t dust the guy who ate him, anyway.” Sans grinned like it was some kind of joke, and Papyrus was just about to scold him when the bunny nodded. Papyrus looked helplessly from it to Sans and back, then sighed in defeated. “All right, fine.” Two bunnies was not much different than one bunny, right? And this was what both Sans and the bunny in question wanted him to do. He stuffed the bunny into his mouth somewhat less gently than the first one. It stayed limp; it had a similar flavor to the other one, but he could taste its despair too. Sans watched with pride as he swallowed the bunny. “See? I knew you could do it.” Papyrus grimaced, placing a paw over his stomach. The orange bunny didn’t squirm like the blue one had. The first bunny had been still for a while now. He couldn’t think too much about what that meant; he didn’t want to cry in front of Sans. “Paps? What’s wrong?” Of course Sans saw right through him anyway. “You know I never wanted to hurt any bunnies.” “What? Did they get hurt?” Papyrus glared at him. “The first one, Blueberry. He isn’t moving at all now. He’s probably—” “Asleep, yeah. How long has ‘e been in there?” “Asleep?” “Well, unconscious, if you wanna put it that way. But he’ll be fine if you give him some vegetables from the fridge. You wanna let them out already? You won’t get much magic out of the second one.” “What?” How could the bunnies be fine, when they’d been eaten? “Paps, don’t tell me you thought I killed all those bunnies?” Papyrus pressed his ears back in shame. “You didn’t?” “Of course not. How did you not—What are they teaching monsters in school these days?” Papyrus felt his face grow hot. “No, no, it’s my fault, I shoulda taken responsibility for—I thought you knew!” Sans’s ears were pressed back as well. “Didn’t you think the bunnies seemed surprisingly okay with it?” “Now that you mention it, yes!” Papyrus perked up. The first bunny—Blueberry—was never in any real danger after all! “I’ll make them an apology salad immediately!” He hurried to the kitchen and started to bustle around purposefully, getting all the vegetables out of the refrigerator. Then he paused as he realized there was still at least one problem. “Er, Sans? How do I get them back out?”